probs on 6.2-prerelease

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 10:46:28AM +1000, Michael Vince wrote:
> Yeah for some reason I couldn't do that, I can't even remember all the 
> reasons now but  the main reason is because I have a USB keyboard, for 
> some reason I can use the USB keyboard in the BIOS but as soon as the 
> boot loader starts with the 10sec menu I loose all control of the keyboard.
> Booting into fixit mode from the CDROM loads the USB drivers (as well as 
> not hanging up the OS anywhere) so I could mount the filesystem and fix it.

I can confirm this problem, and have been fighting with it for quite
some time.  BIOS is configured for "USB Legacy" support (which should
enable the keyboard in such environments).  boot0, boot2, and loader
all accept the keyboard just fine.  Once the kernel loads, it loads
the usb layer, detects the keyboard (via ukbd), and of course pops
up the "Pick a shell" single-user prompt.  But no keyboard input.

This behaviour happened only on my Intel machine; my current AMD
machine does not do this.

The problem as I saw it (which may be an incorrect prognosis, since
my AMD box says the same thing as the Intel via dmesg, but behaves
fine) was that the FreeBSD kernel was considering the default keyboard
device as atkbd* rather than ukbd*.  It wasn't a problem outside
of single-user, since usbd would load and do some magic to make it
all work... but usbd doesn't get loaded in single-user.  :-)

The workaround I found was to use some loader.conf tweaks to disable
specific AT/PS2 keyboard devices.  I believe I used something like
this, but I can't remember (and don't have loader.conf from my Intel
box :( -- And yes, I know psm is for the mouse):

hint.atkbdc.0.disabled="1"
hint.atkbd.0.disabled="1"
hint.psm.0.disabled="1"

This oversight really needs to be addressed.  I'll gladly buy anyone
who wishes to solve it a new USB keyboard to test/debug with.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |