^S/^Q problem in SV/AT 2.4

73701000 lcc at ucscb.UCSC.EDU
Wed May 24 14:22:45 AEST 1989


In article <May.23.23.02.11.1989.3024 at geneva.rutgers.edu> hedrick at geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes:
->
->Now that all the Uport staff seem to be working elsewhere, we're
->starting to get answers to questions that we hadn't been able to
->before.  (While I appreciate this, I don't *really* expect plocher and
->others to spend the rest of their lives trying to atone for the sins
->of Uport.  But we might as well try to get as much out of them as we
->can while they're still feeling helpful.)  So I thought it would be
->worth asking an old question again: Is there a known fix for the
->problem of ^S on the console not being reversible?  By known fix I
->mean something that I can somehow do myself (even if it's just to take
->modules x, y, and z from the 2.3 version).  I assume from what I'm
->hearing here (and one attempt that I made myself) that's it's not
->worth calling Uport at this point.

To the best of my knowledge, the real culprit here is a bug in the one of the
standard keyboard controller chips that is used by many of the generic keyboard 
manufacturers. We actually spent a fair amount of time on this and the part of
the console driver that deals with the keyboard is really correctly coded. We
contacted a few manufacturers and and they are the ones that told us this. We
even got one of the manufacturers to upgrade a keyboard that was sent in by
a customer that had real consistantly bad problems. So you're probably
wondering why the problem got worse from 2.3 -> 2.4 right ? I can't answer
that one fully but I think that it had something to do with the way we were
trying to control the keyboard leds. As a matter of fact, some systems will
completely hang at boot time with 2.4 trying to initialize the keyboard leds.

So the bottem line is that going back to the 2.3 console driver might save
you from keyboard problems but forget it if you've got a non standard ega
or any kind of vga video card.

Ken Chapin



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