Date: Sun, 09 Mar 1997 02:13:10 +0900 From: Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp> To: Brian Somers <brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk> Cc: CVS-committers@freefall.freebsd.org, cvs-all@freefall.freebsd.org, cvs-usrsbin@freefall.freebsd.org, yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/usr.sbin/vidcontrol decode.h Makefile decode.c vidcontrol.1 vidcontrol.c Message-ID: <199703081713.CAA01869@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 08 Mar 1997 14:45:21 GMT." <199703081445.OAA01635@awfulhak.demon.co.uk> References: <199703081445.OAA01635@awfulhak.demon.co.uk>
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>......The reason this is >necessary is because a few people have complained on usenet that they've >had lock-ups on machines with PS/2 mice configured. They have ended up >rebooting their machines from a telnet/serial connection. >I noticed this some time ago and mentioned it (on usenet), only to be >told that I had a bad keyboard. Oops, I haven't checked comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc lately, and missed all those messges ;-( I will go check them now... I see, people are complaining about 2.1.X which are well known to have syscons/psm conflict problems. >It was happening on 3 or 4 machines, so >I decided to "take a look". I couldn't find the problem - mostly because >it's a non-reproducable problem and is very intermittent, but I found >that switching vtys would solve it. Well, not always, I must say. There is no easy solution under 2.1.X, because its syscons and psm drivers can, unknowingly, stamp on the other's toe easily, the mouse cursor may get drunk and go crazy, and a data byte may be left stuck in the keyboard controller once keyboard and/or PS/2 mouse interrupt is lost for some reason or another. Yes, the problem is very intermittent and difficult to reproduce exactly, as you have noticed. >I wrote a program called "setcon" >which I put on ftp.freebsd.org/~brian and my own web page. When some >people recently complained about the problem, I figured that something >more solid should be done..... You are right that something must be done about this. And a few committers, including me, have been working on this. The result of this effort is materializing in 2.2-RELEASE. 2.2 will have new and better syscons and psm drivers (they are in 2.2-BETA, -GAMMA, or better still, 3.0-current). They may not yet eliminate problems entirely, but we are getting closer to that ;-) Therefore, syscons/psm related problems have different nature under 2.1.X and 2.2. (And I am hoping 2.2 will have none of them.) True that the 2.1 branch needs something too. But, it is not easy to back-port the new drivers to the 2.1 branch, and after all the branch is now considered stale... Let's discuss this subject again after 2.2-RELEASE rolls out, shall we? Right now, I cannot set up a 2.1.X box again and try to find what can be done. Kazu
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