*BSD News Article 32452


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!swrinde!pipex!sunic!EU.net!uunet!monoli!relay1!csoft!elvisti!stesin
From: stesin@Elvisti.Kiev.UA (Andrey Stesin)
Subject: Re: Keyboard Lockup Problems
Organization: Elektronni Visti
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 1994 03:22:39 GMT
Message-ID: <1994Jul01.032239.350@Elvisti.Kiev.UA>
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL1]
References: <2ustmq$4fm@blkbox.blkbox.COM>
Lines: 51

Cameron Bevis (cbevis@blkbox.com) wrote:
: Hello all.  I have a problem wherein the keyboard locks up occasionally. 
: I can dial into the system after a lockup, and everything works great,
: just no keyboard input from the console.  This is a very duplicable
: problem if I just bang on CapsLock or NumLock really quickly and also
: happens when switching to/from virtual screens.  This question seems to be
: popping up intermittently in the "questions" newsgroup from since at least
: December. 

	I have absolutely the same symptoms with Intel 486dx-33.
	A couple of keyboards were tested with this box - the same!
	I wrote to FreeBSD mailing lists, and to the author of 'syscons'
	driver, but there wasn't any solution.

: Things I have tried: 

: pcons and sysons: same thing
: calling in from tty00 and "echo"ing to that console: same thing

	The same! :(

: killing caches, shadow bios

	Killing the external cache helps (a little) but the box becomes
	too slow after this, almost unusable!

: The rest of the solutions in the group regarding this question have 
: been installation related, with one exception:

:  "put a 250ms delay before any port I/O involving the LEDs"


	This is a first realistic proposal I know about.

	Folks told me another interesting thing about the LEDs.
	They said: "If you want to determine - is the processor internal
	cache good or bad - try to run ndiags.exe (from NU) on this box.
	If the box will hang totally while running the keyboard LED test -
	your 486 chip has a hardw. bug in internal cache implementation!"
	I can say that the Packard Bell machine we had here hangs up under
	ndiags LED tests, but Intel doesn't.

: Has anybody done this?  Where in the kernel sources/config is this done?  
: Were there any successes not mentioned in the group?

	I didn't new the way; and I'm not sure I know it now...
	Please if someone has any new info about this or maybe a fix -
	I'll be glad to test it.

	
		Thanks in advance  --  Andrew Stesin.