Re: No PS/2 keyboard = panic on X11 start

[Jesse Peterson <jpeterson275%comcast.net@localhost>]

A little late in reply here but I wanted to report that this issue has been 
(seemingly) resolved.

I'm 85% certain this was just a bug in this motherboard's BIOS (AOpen 
vK8T800a-LF). In the BIOS (typical PC Phoenix BIOS) there is an option to turn 
on "USB Emulation" to support things like boot loaders being able to select 
boot options via old BIOS interrupt calls. This BIOS has the option to 
individually enable or disable the Mouse and Keyboard Emulation -- separately. 
Because I didn't need mouse emulation I disabled that and only had the Keybaord 
emulation enabled. When just enable both mouse and keyboard emulation all seems 
to work - X11 starts up fine without a system restart and without a PS/2 
keybaord actually plugged in.

Thanks and wantd to pass along the good news! Obviously been bugging me for a 
few years. ;)
- Jesse

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:00:13 -0800
Jesse Peterson <jpeterson275%comcast.net@localhost> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I've had for a while a USB keyboard that I've been using with NetBSD 
> 3.1/amd64. Only recently however did I get around to actually physically 
> unplugging my old PS/2 keyboard. After the next restart of NetBSD was 
> crashing when XFree86 started. I tried to get a backtrace of the panics 
> without much luck.
> 
> After many hours of debugging what could be the cause I realized that I had 
> recently unplugged the PS/2 keyboard. Upon plugging it back in and restarting 
> everything was fine - X11 started just as it did.
> 
> On a related note I tried to test NetBSD 4.0_RC4/amd64 in an attempt to find 
> the cause (to no avail) and upon realizing the PS/2 keyboard issue I plugged 
> it in while the system was running. Plugging in the keyboard caused a kernel 
> panic instantly.
> 
> Is this a known issue? Perhaps something specific to my hardware? I might be 
> able to help debug if anybody has some ideas. I'd like to be able to just use 
> my USB keyboard without having a PS/2 keyboard also plugged in.
> 
> Dmesg attached.

-- 
Jesse Peterson <jpeterson275%comcast.net@localhost>