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

    by frojack (1554) Subscriber Badge 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.

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  • (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) Subscriber Badge 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.

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