FreeBSD 8 BETA3 unusable (kbd/syscons?)

[Antony Mawer]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 5:54 AM, Ed Schouten<ed at 80386.nl> wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> Would it be a lot of work to figure out which SVN revision of HEAD
> introduced this regression? Even if you can't get a specific revision
> number, reducing it to a week's span in revision numbers would be very
> helpful.
>
> People also reported issues to me where the first keypresses after the
> system has booted are discarded. I have yet to be convinced this is a
> TTY issue, not the keyboard code, interrupt handling, etc.

I saw an issue yesterday with 8.0-BETA3/i386 where a new install on a
system used as a router would "hang" when attempting to go to
multi-user mode. When I say hang -- the system appeared to be passing
packets OK, but the console was non responsive. Breaking into kgdb
showed that it appeared to be somewhere in the kbdmux/usb keyboard
code.

That particular system was an IBM xSeries 300 with a PS2 keyboard (no
USB devices attached, though it has 2 USB ports). I rebooted into the
BIOS and checked what USB options were configured ... I had the
following (from memory):

    USB Support ................... Enabled
    USB Keyboard Support .... Disabled
    USB Mouse Support ........ Disabled

I changed USB Keyboard Support to Enabled, rebooted, and the system
then booted into multi-user fine.

Not sure if this was related but thought I'd mention it in case it was
relevant. If it would be beneficial I can disable the option again and
get a full backtrace ...

--Antony