Re: odd PS/2 keyboard fail

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Apr 27, 2010, at 12:48 54AM, der Mouse wrote:

> I've got a machine (a Gigabyte GA-7VTXE board with an Athlon 2600+ in
> it) which has for a long time been running, more or less happily, under
> my 1.4T (a slightly hacked-up 1.4T, but I don't think I've touched the
> relevant bits).
> 
> Today I tried 4.0.1 on this hardware.  To my surprise, the keyboard in
> the PS/2 keyboard port simply does not work past the point of the
> bootloader handing control over to the kernel, though it works fine up
> to that point.  (The symptom is that keystrokes are ignored; for all I
> can tell from the response I get, I might as well not be typing at
> all.)  It's clearly not the hardware, both because it works before that
> and because 1.4T has no problems.  And it's not just a lack of PS/2
> keyboard support in the kernel; that same boot drive. including the
> kernel, works just fine, including the same PS/2 keyboard, on an IBM P4
> board.  The Gigabyte board also works fine if I put the keyboard behind
> a PS/2-to-USB adapter in one of the USB ports, though not if I plug it
> in only after boot.
> 
Are there any BIOS options set concerning USB keyboards?  I wasn't using NetBSD 
in 1.4T days, but I think that a lot of our decent USB support is more recent 
than that; it's possible that your old kernel didn't recognize the USB option.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb