Re: Keyboard Jammed error patch 2.4.35-pre4

[Willy Tarreau]

Hello David,

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:59:47PM -0700, David W Studeman wrote:
>  Hello! The changes that were made on 04-25-2007 as "[PATCH 
> 2.4.35-pre4] fix 'pc_keyb: controller jammed (0xA7)' error" have broken 
> the ability to compile with no keyboard and no VT support. This mainly 
> affects Cobalt machines which do not have dmi present as these use a 
> flashrom to boot with and not a typical bios so dmi blacklisting would 
> be pointless unless it allowed for no dmi present and then blacklist. I 
> had to create a patch against 2.4.34 to restore the ability to compile 
> with no keyboard and VT support.

Grrr... I see what's happening. I remember having checked that the
kbd_controller_present macro was really not used before merging the
patch, but obviously I had not looked deep enough. It's defined by
ia64, mips and mips64 in include/asm.

Could you please test the patch below (untested here). It should revert
to pre-2.4.35 behaviour on all architectures cited above. If you confirm
that it works, I'll merge it.

BTW, in the mean time, you can boot with the "nokeyb" option. It will
disable the keyboard. This is what I use on some non-blacklisted systems,
and the option was precisely provided by this patch.

Also, if you don't have any PC keyboard on your machines, you can
build without support for any VT/keyboard. I'm already doing this
on some embedded systems, and it works fine. If your platform still
requires that some keyboard is enabled, you may want to try to enable
CONFIG_DUMMY_KEYB which I've been using in the past.

Regards,
Willy