I don't know if this is applicable to other ports (are PS/2 connectors
peculiar to the PC world?).  I suspect that it only applies to i386's, so
I'm posting here.

Is it a bug or the nature of the beast that a PS/2 mouse plugged into a
keyboard PS/2 connector *prevents* the OS from booting?  (It gets up to
the point of loading the kernel and turning on the "soft" block cursor,
then freezes.)  The last actual message is the one you get from seeing the
kernel image loaded from disk, with the cursor scrolled down to the next
(still blank) line.

This is NetBSD 1.6/i386.  It's a very vanilla installation (I was doing
some experiements and wiped the disk doing a fresh install; absolutely
generic kernel).

I don't remember this happening under previous OS's.  I'm sure I've
swapped the connectors at least once in the past, since the labeling on
this machine is a little unclear.  I thought that in the past it just came
up without a working keyboard/mouse.  (Or maybe one worked but the other
did not?)

Is the hardware *really* different, or is it just a convention?  Could the
OS probe the port and try to figure out which is connected?


Is this something worth filing a PR on, or should I just forget about it?
(Up until NetBSD tries to boot, there is *NO* evidence of any problem
(the keyboard is on a UXB port, so there's no chance to notice a dead
keyboard).  Since I was fooling with the hardware a bit, I was afraid that
I'd damaged some motherboard hardware, at first.  A crack in a trace, say.
Unplugging the mouse was a "welllll....*maybe* this will make a
difference" last resort kind of thing; (^&.  BIOS didn't mind, the
bootloader didn't mind...but NetBSD wouldn't boot.  Seems like a sneaky
way to render a computer inoperable: Plug in a mouse on the keyboard
connector and wait for the next system reboot...)

(ramble)


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu