Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:12:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
To: Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>
cc: dtor_core@ameritech.net,
       Martin Bretschneider <mailing-lists-mmv@bretschneidernet.de>,
       <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>,
       <linux-usb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>,
       Leonid <nouser@lpetrov.net>
Subject: Re: PROBLEM: PS/2 keyboard does not work with 2.6.15
In-Reply-To: <20060110074336.GA7462@suse.cz>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0601101008440.5060-100000@iolanthe.rowland.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:

> It's usually that the BIOS does an incomplete emulation of the i8042
> chip, while still getting in the way to the real i8042. Usually GRUB and
> DOS don't care about sending any commands to the i8042, and so they
> work. The Linux i8042.c driver needs to use them to enable the PS/2
> mouse port and do other probing, and if the commans are not working, it
> just bails out.
> 
> The question of course is why the handoff code doesn't work on that
> platform.

It turned out that a BIOS upgrade fixed the problem, but this doesn't 
answer your question.

The problem wasn't an incomplete emulation of the i8042, because when the
USB handoff code was commented out the PS/2 keyboard worked okay.  This
means the handoff, when enabled, wasn't being done correctly.  That could
be the fault of the USB drivers or the BIOS (or both).  We have no way to
tell which, because the users have all switched to the newer BIOS.

Alan Stern

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