usb keyboard dying at loader prompt

Andriy Gapon avg at icyb.net.ua
Tue Nov 11 05:14:08 PST 2008


on 08/11/2008 14:31 Volker said the following:
> Andriy,
> 
> On 12/23/-58 20:59, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>> I have a quite strange problem.
>> This is with 7-BETA amd64.
> 
> Did it work with earlier versions?

Can't say, this is a new machine, FreeBSD took its virginity :-)

>> All of USB is out of kernel and is loaded via modules.
>> BIOS has "Legacy USB" enabled.
>> I have only a USB keyboard, no PS/2 port.
> 
> Can you check BIOS settings for EHCI handover?

No such settings.

> If the BIOS does not have handover enabled, it may disable legacy
> support after a timeout, which is often bad. IMO this is the same with
> booting off USB drives but every BIOS handles that different.

This doesn't seem to be the case. The behavior is quite random,
sometimes I can work at loader prompt for may minutes, sometimes
keyboard is dead after a few seconds.
Also, I think USB keyboard is handled by UHCI, not EHCI in my case, but
I am not sure if this matters. My guess is that Legacy support should
work until OS explicitly takes over by using special procedure (this
should be done for UHCI as well).

BTW, it seems that our UHCI take-over code is far more simple than what
MS described here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/usbhost.mspx#EQHAC

Anyway, this happens after loader is done.

>> The keyboard works file in BIOS and for selecting boot device in boot0
>> menu. It also works in loader menu. If in the menu I select to go to
>> loader prompt then it works for about 5 seconds and then "dies" - no
>> reaction to key presses, no led change, nothing.
>> I haven't actually verified if the keyboard would still work if I stayed
>> in loader menu for longer than ~10 seconds.
>>
>> This doesn't happen if USB is built into kernel.
> 
> That sound strange. I have no idea why that might work (or I'm totally
> wrong with my handover theory).

I was incorrect about the above, I have already seen it happening both ways.

>> Weird...
> 
> Yes, sounds like or it's probably easily explainable ;)


-- 
Andriy Gapon


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