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Date:      Sun, 12 Aug 2001 17:25:30 -0700 (PDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
Cc:        current@freebsd.org, Sean Kelly <smkelly@zombie.org>, Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>, Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>, Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD's aggressive keyboard probe/attach
Message-ID:  <XFMail.010812172530.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <3B75C7B1.FF2E739E@mindspring.com>

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On 12-Aug-01 Terry Lambert wrote:
> Mike Smith wrote:
>> 
>> > :Finally, most keyboard/mouse/monitor switches don't work with
>> > :FreeBSD;
>> 
>> This is actually not true.  I'd doubt that you've even tried many of them.

*sigh*

It seems no one has investigated why we probe keyboards at all.  Maybe if
people would do a little research, they would _learn_ something.  Assuming that
we always have PS/2 keyboards present breaks the case of people who use *shock*
non-PS/2 keyboards like USB keyboards.  Now, I'm sure that you think that
everyone should use PS/2 keyboards and that anyone who doesn't is just absolute
pure scum of the earth, but I don't share that same view. :-P

Seriously, if you go up to a FreeBSD box and hotplug a USB keyboard (which was
_designed_ for hotplug) it will work just fine.  Now, there are a couple of
different ways to fix the problem:

1) Implement probing/detection for PS/2 keyboards post-boot.  You can hack
this by having the atkbd0 driver always attach to IRQ 1, but not create and
export a kbd0 syscons keyboard driver until it gets an interrupt event from the
keyboard.

2) Rewrite the syscons keyboard layer so that we don't have a primary keyboard
that is always the current keyboard, but instead make it accept input from all
keyboards currently plugged into the system.  With this you could go back to
assuming a PS/2 keyboard is always around as a hack.

Obviously Windows can handle USB keyboards, so why don't you put your money
where your mouth is and make FreeBSD work fine on hardware that Windows works
on.

Patches accepted.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/

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