keyboard does not work in kernel space

Rong-En Fan grafan at gmail.com
Wed May 10 11:21:30 PDT 2006


On 5/10/06, Maksim Yevmenkin <maksim.yevmenkin at savvis.net> wrote:
> Sebastiaan van Erk wrote:
> > Hi all!
> >
> > I just got a new Inspiron 9400 laptop and was trying to do full disk
> > encryption with GEOM ELI. Everything seems to be working fine now,
> > except that the keyboard does not seem to work in kernel space so that
> > when my USB boot stick asks me for the passphrase of my internal hard
> > drive, I cannot enter anything. I know this is not specific to GEOM ELI,
> > since I was messing around with my USB pendrive and forgot to specify a
> > root device, which the kernel prompted me for the root device and I had
> > exactly the same problem: the keyboard did not work.
>
> known issue. kbdmux(4) + atkbd(4) does not currently work in "kernel"
> space. the reason is because atkbd(4) does not seem to deal with
> "polled" mode correctly.
>
> in "kernel" space interrupts are disabled and the keyboard has to be
> polled for characters. kbdmux(4) expects low level keyboard driver to
> deal with it. ukbd(4) driver does that, atkbd(4) does not.
>
> > When I change the root device to my pen drive it boots to the login
> > prompt (user space), and the keyboard works fine at that moment.
> >
> > Is this problem familiar to anybody? Is there any way to solve it?
>
> 1) disable kbdmux(4)
>
> or
>
> 2) use ukbd(4) (usb) keyboard
>
> i'm looking into this, but due to limited time i can not provide eta.

Since we have kbdmux turned on as default in 6.1R, could we have
an ERRATA entry for this? So people will be warned about this.

As for me, I turned off kbdmux for all boxes that I might need break
into debugger.

Thanks,
Rong-En Fan


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