Smartcard reader issues since update to "Crimson"

Hardware Librem 5
1

Greetings Forum,

I have upgraded to the “Crimson” release a few weeks ago and while globally not much has changed, I do notice that the smartcard reader seems to be rather unreliable now. I often get errors like

commands.c:249:CmdPowerOn Invalid slot numbers

and

ifdhandler.c:1317:IFDHPowerICC() PowerUp failed

and

winscard.c:344:SCardConnect() Card not Powered

when I do a systemctl status pcscd. It’s not a tremendous issue as I can simply restart pcscd and it works again, but I find it slightly annoying. This was not something I noticed in the “Byzantium” release. Has anyone else encountered this behaviour?

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2

Yes, I’ve encountered this behavior. Started occurring after upgrade to Crimson last week. Didn’t know about systemctl restart pcscd, so I just restarted the phone. Thanks for that pointer.

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3

Yes! I did that too in the beginning but after some digging I found this to be the best workaround at the moment. The thing is also that even after a restart it sometimes stops again.

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4

I’m not sure what to do at this point. I requested an account at the purism gitlab instance but never received approval. So I cannot file a bug, which makes things difficult. Are there other options? I had hoped that the various updates since I first posted this would have changed something, but the behaviour is still the same.

5

I do not had this issue. My Smartcard is still there and i can access it. Maybe it is kind of a race condition. Try to extract it. Reboot and launch the system and inserted it again. After booting or before booting.

Edit: Or do you use an external USB Smart Card Reader Device?

6

Did you do an in-place upgrade or a reflash? For reporting a problem, the latter is probably better. If the problem happens immediately after a reflash on a totally clean system (nothing additional installed, no settings tweaked) then that is a more solid foundation for a problem report.

@JCS, can you badger someone about this?

7

Well! I’d like to start by apologizing for the prolonged silence, I had been busy with other stuff and haven’t filed the bug. Regarding your question: I did a normal debian upgrade to “crimson”.

In the meantime I discovered that the errors mentioned above also appear when it’s working, which seems a bit odd. However: since the last kernel update it appears that the issue is gone! I’ve had 3 days straight of the smartcard working all day without issues! So whoever did this - thanks! I will mark this as solved for the moment.

purism@pureos:~$ uname -a
Linux pureos 6.6.0-1-librem5 #2 SMP PREEMPT 6.6.119pureos2~cri1 2026-01-23 21:07:41 UTC aarch64 GNU/Linux

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