Bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2016 15:58:12 -0500, Dean E. Weimer wrote:
> On 2016-06-24 3:24 pm, Manish Jain wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have a rather bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3 amd64.
> > Things would have been much worse had the SSD switch not worked for my
> > other OS - Windows XP, a bit surprising because XP does not support
> > SSD TRIM.
> > 
> > For my upgrade, there were 3 components which I upgraded simultaneously 
> > :
> > 
> > 1) Keyboard -> LED backlit keyboard (Cooler Master Devastator, USB)
> > 2) 2 GB DDR3 RAM -> 8GB DDR3 (G Skill)
> > 3) Sata HD -> SSD (Samsung EVO 500 GB)
> > 
> > The keyboard upgrade itself failed for FreeBSD. The moment I switch on
> > the LED backlight light for the keys, console output freezes till I
> > turn off the backlight. This is surprising because the keyboard works
> > well on XP, which was developed almost 2 decades back. The reason this
> > is important for me is because I love working in the dark, with no
> > bright lights around. LED keyboards make that possible. Not just that,
> > the keyboard looks sensational - particularly with LED on, when the
> > thing looks futuristic.
> 
> Cooler Master Devastator is a poorly designed LED keyboard for using on 
> FreeBSD/Linux, I did a quick search because I was surprised it wouldn't 
> work.
> 
> The scroll lock key turns on/off the back light, so your console is 
> freezing because its doing exactly what you told it to do when pressing 
> the scroll lock button.

Is that for real? Of course nobody in "Windows" land uses the
Scroll Lock key, so the manufacturer maybe thought "Well, lets
just use this key, nobody will notice, because this key actually
doesn't do anything!" ... wow ...

Compare for example the IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad keyboard where
you can switch on a little LED above the display to "shed light"
on the keyboard. You press Fn+Home (if I remember correctly).
Nothing (!) is output to the keyboard buffer. So you can see:
It is possible to implement a hardware function (light on/off)
without interfering with a software function (scroll lock/unlock).

Also note the "was designed decades ago" - maybe it only works
with decades old "Windows", so don't expect it to work on a
current modern-age operating system. ;-)



> Its not an issue with FreeBSD not supporting the 
> LED backlit keyboard, just that they chose a poor key to link the on/off 
> feature of the LED to when using the keyboard on FreeBSD/Linux. You may 
> be able to work around it by using scroll lock prior to FreeBSD starting 
> to boot and hopefully it will stay on.

It's also possible to re-assign the Scroll Lock key code to an
"empty action". On the text mode console, the Pause/Break key
performs the same action as Scroll Lock, so the functionality
is not lost.



> Someone else might have a better idea for a work around on this.

Press Scroll Lock to activate light (console locked), press Pause/Break
to unlock console again. As both keys are next to each other,
develop the routine to press them after each other to toggle the
light. Inside X, Scroll Lock usually has no function assigned,
so it shouldn't be a problem there.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...