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OpenBSD Keyboard Problems Fixed by pms(4) and a Forcible Mouse Port Reset

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

cnst writes:

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: 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.
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  • (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.

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    • (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