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posted by janrinok on Friday March 13 2015, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-not-fixed-in-5.7 dept.

Theo de Raadt writes a fascinating story from the s2k15 hackathon in Brisbane about the reasons that the mice and keyboards were problematic on the new ThinkPad X1, specifically, having keyboard repeat and shutter during install, eventually being figured out to happen due to the large and extra sensitive touchpad. It all came down to the pms driver, or lack thereof, as it's missing only on the RAMDISK kernels used on the install media, and they were the only ones being visibly affected.

"The solution is to forcibly reset the mouse port at attach," de Raadt proclaims. Some other keyboard issues, notably boot -c not working on some machines, were also determined to be caused by the mouse ports, too.

But the changes are risky, and require lots of testing prior to commit, due to the plethora of keyboard controller models, so, it didn't make the cut for the upcoming 5.7 release.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 13 2015, @02:41AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 13 2015, @02:41AM (#157105)

    Clearly, you're holding it wrong!

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @02:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @02:55AM (#157110)

    Sounds like a recipe for endless problems and missing functionality.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by engblom on Friday March 13 2015, @06:15AM

      by engblom (556) on Friday March 13 2015, @06:15AM (#157160)

      I have been many years running OpenBSD on a laptop. I can not understand why you got moderated insightful for your comment. Have you actually tried OpenBSD on a laptop?

      OpenBSD has everything you expect for desktop/laptop usage with exception of flash-plugin and Skype because both of them are closed source. It has good drivers for WiFi, ACPI, all common programs (Firefox, Chromium, Libreoffice, Xfce, Gnome etc).

      What do you consider to be missing and what do you consider to be a problem?

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @06:50AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday March 13 2015, @06:50AM (#157170) Journal

        If you've use it for Many Years on the same laptop, I can assure you it started out as a compromise (people forget the pain of the past), and got better over time.

        There are STILL things that don't work on older laptops, and other things that won't work on newer laptops.
        I use it every day on a laptop, just as an auxiliary screen.

        I'll be ordering CDs and moving my main firewall to a new box with OpenBSD. Maybe my mail server too.

        I have enough iron in that new box to run a virtual machine as well, but I haven't found any thing that will allow me to use OpenBSD as a host for a virtual machine.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 1) by jb on Friday March 13 2015, @07:14AM

          by jb (338) on Friday March 13 2015, @07:14AM (#157180)

          I have enough iron in that new box to run a virtual machine as well, but I haven't found any thing that will allow me to use OpenBSD as a host for a virtual machine.

          Perhaps not on commodity platforms, but if you can get your hands on some T-series sparc64 gear, OpenBSD's ldomd(8) has worked well since 5.5.

          • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @10:03PM

            by frojack (1554) on Friday March 13 2015, @10:03PM (#157522) Journal

            Fail to see how that is germane to running a virtual machine inside a Openbsd Host.

            Theo de Raadt has a serious attitude against hypervisors and virtual machines.

            --
            No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by novak on Friday March 13 2015, @06:36AM

      by novak (4683) on Friday March 13 2015, @06:36AM (#157166) Homepage

      Some people care more about well engineered, secure software than touchscreen drivers and 3D graphical window animations.

      Yeah, they don't have the biggest software team, nor the most drivers. They still build high quality software.

      --
      novak
    • (Score: 2) by joekiser on Friday March 13 2015, @04:53PM

      by joekiser (1837) on Friday March 13 2015, @04:53PM (#157350)

      Using a relatively recent Thinkpad with OpenBSD has historically been an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. The only thing missing is a tool or system call that prolongs battery life on AC (example: once discharged to 40%, the battery automatically starts charging to 80% again before starting its discharge cycle). This software is available on Linux and under Lenovo's ThinkVantage suite for Windows. I went through a 6-cell on my X201/X200s Frankenpad in about 8 months under OpenBSD, when it would have lasted several years on other platforms.

      XFCE, LibreOffice, Firefox, VLC, etc. are all kept up to date and hardware support is at least as good as Windows. I have no experience using other laptops with OpenBSD.

      --
      Debt is the currency of slaves.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday March 13 2015, @02:55AM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday March 13 2015, @02:55AM (#157111) Journal

    Pre-orders for 5.7 are now open, and the change log is posted.

    Fixes to Radeon drivers, including one that I use are in, and several new wifi cards, and a lot of other drivers
    for several different chipsets, disks, network cards, audio devices, USB 3.

    Also they are slowly moving away from big lock where ever they can, which should make multi-processor support
    much more effective. A boatload of security improvements as well.

    http://www.openbsd.org/57.html [openbsd.org]

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday March 13 2015, @03:46AM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday March 13 2015, @03:46AM (#157121) Homepage
      * PowerMac7,2 and PowerMac7,3 can now boot with a multiprocessor kernel.

      Woo woo! The machine I've been running Linux on for nearly a decade is now supported! Shame that it's all but obsolete now. I think a decent modern tablet has more CPU ooomph than this crate.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday March 13 2015, @06:31AM

        by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday March 13 2015, @06:31AM (#157164) Homepage Journal

        My experience with FreeBSD and illumos on laptops have been ... unpleasent, due to missing drivers and such. While from a userland perspective, you can make any UNIX-like act like well, any Linux distro, but I find the out of the box experience to be lacking. Biggest reason why I haven't migrated my systems over to FreeBSD and the like after Ubuntu decided to adopt systemd.

        --
        Still always moving
        • (Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday March 13 2015, @09:01AM

          by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday March 13 2015, @09:01AM (#157197) Homepage
          Power management is one of the most important things, and it's one of the things that the system vendors are so tight-lipped about, so writing FLOSS drivers is horribly retarded. Add to that the fact that most lappies are x86, and have unmanageable ACPI and other controllers that are more in control than the kernel is, and even with the best intentions, the FLOSS kernel has an uphill struggle.

          Some BSD might go on my next replacement machine. I think I'll try slackware first. I've never tried it before, AFAIK, I may have given it a go back in 1996-ish, but may be confusing it with one of the others. I think this weekend is "build a box from dumpster bits" weekend - wish me luck.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by cmn32480 on Friday March 13 2015, @03:42AM

    by cmn32480 (443) <cmn32480NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday March 13 2015, @03:42AM (#157117) Journal

    Can they do that for my wife? PLEASE??!?!?!?!?!

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
    • (Score: 0, Troll) by davester666 on Friday March 13 2015, @04:34AM

      by davester666 (155) on Friday March 13 2015, @04:34AM (#157141)

      She's doesn't actually get PMS that bad. She just likes banging somebody else for that week every month.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by choose another one on Friday March 13 2015, @11:00AM

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 13 2015, @11:00AM (#157215)

      There already is a long term fix - install the menopause plugin Do note though that there is no backout procedure, and it is not guaranteed to improve the user experience, in fact in some cases it can make it a lot worse...

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by cnst on Friday March 13 2015, @03:37PM

    by cnst (4275) on Friday March 13 2015, @03:37PM (#157317)

    Someone just reported that PMS_RESET helps with the TrackPoint nipple on T440p, too.

    http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=142617601119018 [marc.info]

  • (Score: 2) by Marneus68 on Friday March 13 2015, @09:36PM

    by Marneus68 (3572) on Friday March 13 2015, @09:36PM (#157502) Homepage

    It's funny how hardware compatibility issues on OpenBSD are, in and of themselves, newsworthy; especially given the number of "screw systemd we OpenBSD now" posts we see on systemd-related news.