Re: USB keyboard issue

On 22 May, Rajappa Iyer wrote:
> Well, I made a mistake of buying a "next-gen" motherboard with no PS/2
> connectors... USB and firewire only.  FWIW, it's an Abit IT-7 Max.
> It's a reasonably nice mobo, but...  
> 
> Now FreeBSD-5.x does boot up on this and has no problem with the USB
> keyboard if my BIOS setting for the USB keyboard support is "OS".
> However, in this case BootMgr does not see the keyboard.  If I change
> the BIOS setting for USB Keyboard support to "BIOS", then BootMgr is
> happy with the keyboard, but not FreeBSD.
> 
> Any ideas? 

This sounds a lot like a problem that I ran into about a year ago when I
was playing with a USB keyboard on a machine that had both types of
ports.  The names of the settings in the BIOS were different, but the
symptoms where the same.  In my motherboard's equivalent of your
motherboard's "BIOS" setting, the information logged in dmesg.boot made
me suspect that the PS/2 keyboard emulation in the BIOS was good enough
to fool FreeBSD into thinking that it had a PS/2 keyboard, which it
attached as /dev/kbd0.  It also saw that it had a USB keyboard, which it
attached as /dev/kbd1.  Something that happened after the attachment of
/dev/kbd0 in the boot sequence caused the emulated PS/2 keyboard to
disappear, so /dev/console ended up without a keyboard.  If I remotely
logged on, I could run
	kbdcontrol -k /dev/kbd1 < /dev/console
or something like that to get the USB keyboard to work.

Judging by what's leftover in /boot/loader.conf from that time, I
believe I was able to make the USB keyboard work without the need to run
kbdcontrol by adding:
	hint.atkbd.0.disabled="1"
to loader.conf.

If you can log in remotely, boot the machine with both setting and
compare the dmesg.boot.