On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, David Laight wrote:
Hmmm... This shouldn't be needed, I can't remember if the bios call congetc() does is expected to block or return -1 (or similar) to indicate 'nothing available'.
The patch is a workaround for a firmware bug.
In any case it is worth checking what the mbr code does. Perhaps we should just directly read the ps2 keyboard uart!
That might make things worse. It appears that USB legacy support isn't enabled on these machines (keyboard doesn't work with 'boot -c'), so the bios call is probably talking directly to the USB keyboard. If you spoke ps2, you'd lose it completely!