vt(4) and geli(8)

[Glen Barber]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 07:10:56PM -0700, Peter Wemm wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Chris Nehren
> <cnehren+freebsd-stable at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On 2014/04/18, 11:36, Greg Rivers wrote:
> >>
> >> The new vt system console looks really nice.  But on hosts that
> >> have geli encrypted devices that prompt for the passphrase at
> >> boot, no keyboard input reaches geli.  The keyboard doesn't
> >> appear to be dead, as the caps-lock and num-lock keys toggle;
> >> geli just doesn't receive any input. This is on 10-STABLE amd64
> >> built from yesterday's sources. "hw.vga.textmode=1" doesn't make
> >> any difference.
> >>
> >> Has anyone else encountered this?
> >>
> >
> > Yes, I have, on my FreeBSD workstation with a USB keyboard.  It's running
> > FreeBSD 10 with geli-encrypted ZFS root.  This happened before I updated to
> > vt, though.  I managed to work around the problem, surprisingly enough, by
> > mashing the keyboard when the system boots as soon as I see bold white
> > kernel text.  Then, when prompted for the passphrase (after all the USB
> > devices finish probing / attaching), I hit enter to clear the buffer and
> > then am able to enter the passphrase correctly.
> >
> > I'll be filing a PR for this, probably on Monday, should I not be able to
> > find one that's similar.
> >
> > --
> > Chris Nehren
> 
> For what it's worth, I don't think this is specific to vt.  You can
> sometimes get the same behavior when you hit the mountroot prompt.
> Some of the machines in the freebsd cluster will accept input at a
> mountroot prompt, the others we have to power cycle and fix
> vfs.root.mountfrom.  vt isn't involved.  I don't know what the
> variable is.
> 
> I once suspected it is some combination of ddb/kdb presence, and/or
> serial console / multiconsole mode but I don't think that holds up.
> 

I'm convinced this is a USB issue.  When I have a USB keyboard plugged
in to my laptop, I observe the same behavior as Chris (on 11.0-CURRENT
r264302).

When I am prompted to enter the passphrase and do not have the USB
keyboard plugged in (meaning, my laptop built-in keyboard), do not
observe this behavior.

Glen

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