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Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 05:15:54 -0600
To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
From: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com>
Subject: Re: Stuck! 2.2 Gamma won't go. 
Cc: bugs@freebsd.org
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References: Your message of "Mon, 10 Feb 1997 02:28:48 CST."             <3.0.1.32.19970210022848.00691d20@bugs.us.dell.com>
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At 12:40 AM 2/10/97 -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>
>[Jordan theorizes about what's wrong]

I've more accurately described the problem in another message.

>Perhaps you could post details of this system's configuration
>(make & manufacturer) to -hackers and see if the 2 or 3 folk
>who deal with PS/2 mice can give you some clues as to what
>to do in debugging this so that they can make the PS/2 mouse
>driver less pathologically behaved on your equipment.

I'm convinced it's not system specific.  I'm using a new system 
for which I did the BIOS.  I'm also a maintainer of the 8042 
keyboard controller code (when necessary) but there hasn't been 
a change to it in several years (millions of systems ago).

>The fact that the PS/2 mouse driver is pathological just in 
>general is already known, and why do you think it's disabled 
>by default? ;-)

Probably because nobody has figured it out yet.  

The PS/2 mouse interface is certainly a strange one, but 
most of the mystery surrounding it probably arises from the 
poor documentation and poorly understood behavior.  I could 
help quite a bit if there's trouble getting it to work on 
"good" system implementations.  But I don't know about the 
bugs that exist in other peoples' keyboard controllers, and 
that's probably where most of the trouble is.  

The PS/2 mouse interface is *not* inherently buggy or 
unreliable, but some of the implementations are.

>Unfortunately, fixing it just takes as long as it takes with
>volunteers working on it.

True.  I do understand this.

>In any case, there has been recent interest in improving this driver
>and the perpetrators hang out in -hackers, so you might do as I
>suggested above and see what happens. ;)

I'll do that, depending on what Joerg says in response 
to my other message.

Thanks for the MTS (midnight technical support),

Tony