by Hi there.
I have a Compaq AP200 server to set up for Linux, and some sticky
points have been found:
1) Keyboard dies during early kernel start. The keyboard identifies
itself as a DeLL QuietKey, 101+ with the two extra Windows95 keys.
I boot the kernel from a LILO prompt. Never has the keyboard failed
to work at this time. I type in the name of the kernel to start,
and it starts.
Sometimes, upon booting the 2.0.35 kernel, the keyboard dies early
on in the kernel initialization. It seems to coincide with an
inordinate amount of time spent in the kernel initialization early
on. At first it would happen after a message that 16 RAM disks
were being made. The system would pause, and I try the Caps-lock
key, and it would be dead.
I removed the RAM disk support, and problem went away for a few
reboots. Today it happened again, after the message for the RTC
initialization, the pause, no Caps-lock, no keyboard.
I removed the RTC support. It still happened, but this time after
the message for serial port initialization: the long pause, no Caps
lock, no keyboard.
I have noticed that if I hit the Caps-lock key twice before typing
in the kernel label (on and then off), then the problem seems to
go away. I just tried it a few times. That is interesting, since
it is the Caps-lock key that I use to see if the keyboard hasn't
died during startup.
The indication of a failure is that near the beginning of the kernel
init, there is a pause of about 3 seconds, maybe more. Every time
this has happened, the keyboard is dead. No errors are given about
the keyboard, but the /proc/interrupts shows no activity on IRQ 1,
labeled for keyboard, and there doesn't seem to be anything else on
the IRQ.
I have diff'ed the dmesg output from a failed start and an OK start,
and they are identical.
Any ideas? It looks like an interrupt problem or maybe a keyboard
initialization problem.
2) The video card is an AGP (on the PCI bus) Elsa Gloria Synergy,
which uses a Texas Instruments TVP4020 chip. I haven't seen
any support for this chip and SuperProbe reports unknown SVGA.
I see references to TVP30xx chips in XF86_{Mach64,S3,SVGA} and
SuperProbe, and yet when I look at the XFree86 site, I see no
mention of any TVP chips.
Does anyone know how much work it will take to support the TVP4020
on AGP? If there is no work underway, what can I do to make some
progress?
Please let me know if you can help on either of these.
Thanks,
Joseph Martin