At Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:13:01 -0800, "Greg A. Woods" <woods%planix.ca@localhost> wrote: Subject: NetBSD boots on a macbook air but the keyboard is unresponsive > > However then as I try to proceed I find the keyboard is not doing > anything. The only key that does anything is the power button, which > promptly shuts the system down (acpi0: entering state S5) as it should. So with further research it seems like Apple have been using an SPI bus internally in their laptops for upwards of a decade now to attach their keyboards and trackpads (and touch bars). NetBSD spi(4) doesn't attach to anything on my macbook air. There seems to have been work since at least 2019 in Linux with some drivers for Apple SPI devices. There's also apparently been some other independent work in FreeBSD for drivers. However FreeBSD-15.0 also still needs an external USB keyboard to be usable on my macbook air 2020. The FreeBSD spigen(4) driver doesn't seem to attach to anything either, though maybe it needs to be loaded first at boot time -- I haven't tried that yet. So is anyone per chance working on, or thinking of working on, SPI support that'll work on Apple laptops? There must be literally tonnes of older Apple laptops no longer loved by Apple out there just waiting to run NetBSD! BTW, without disabling the i915drmkms driver the system definitely hangs -- the live image will not complete booting to userland as the network never starts. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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