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Date:      Mon, 1 Apr 1996 10:40:18 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        melrobin@Jetson.UH.EDU (Melvin Deloyd Robinson)
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Rebooting
Message-ID:  <199604010110.KAA01801@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <1.5.4b12.32.19960330183753.0068df5c@jetson.uh.edu> from "Melvin Deloyd Robinson" at Mar 30, 96 12:37:53 pm

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Melvin Deloyd Robinson stands accused of saying:
> 
> I have a friend who has installed FreeBSD 2.1-RELEASE on his machine.  Upon
> rebooting he gets an error stating that the Keyboard reboot failed and then
> the machine tries the CPU shutdown.  The later never works and I'm stumped
> about what to tell him.  

His motherboard chipset and keyboard controller are bogus.  He has no
alternative but to use the Reset button, as it's impossible to cause his
machine to reboot in the "normal" fashions.

> I looked in the code (module vm_machdep.c) and found the error message, but
> can't glean very much from that.  Looking at the dmesg output the sc0 driver
> is from 60h-6Fh which seems correct (at least it agrees with my machine),
> but is this the address for IO_KBD.  The code outputs 0xFE to IO_KBD + 4,
> but is this the same as CTRL-ALT-DELETE?  

The 'vulcan nerve pinch' isn't special - under DOS it's interpreted by
the BIOS which causes a reboot, under FreeBSD it's handled by the 
keyboard driver.  The command to the keyboard controller is supposed to
strobe the CPU reset line - if the 'Keyboard reset failed' message shows,
this has failed to happen.  The shutdown code then tries to generate a 
triple fault, which should cause the CPU to reset, but this fails also
on some motherboards.  (Your friend quite likely has a UMC chipset on their
motherboard).

There's an option "BROKEN_KEYBOARD_RESET" that avoids using the keyboard 
reset technique because it causes some motherboards to hang, and thus
the triple-fault technique never gets tried.  In your friend's case, there
is most likely nothing that can be done.

> Melvin

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496       [[
]] realtime instrument control          (ph/fax)  +61-8-267-3039        [[
]] Collector of old Unix hardware.      "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick  [[



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