change typematic rate, or the X server (XFree86 or Accelerated X)
starts up.
So far, there have been two independent reports from Dell Latitude XPi
notebook/laptop owners. The Latitude seems to be the only system which
suffers from this problem. (I don't know the problem is with the
entire Latitude line or with only some Latitude models) No problem
report has been heard about other systems (I certainly cannot
reproduce the problem in my -current and 2.2 systems).
In 3.0-CURRENT, 2.2-RELEASE and 2.2-GAMMA-970310, when programming the
keyboard LED/repeat-rate, `set_keyboard()' in `syscons' tells the
keyboard controller not to generate keyboard interrupt (IRQ1) and then
enable tty interrupts, expecting the keyboard interrupt doesn't occur.
It appears that somehow Latitude's keyboard controller still generates
the keyboard interrupt thereafter, and `set_keyboard()' doesn't see
the return code from the keyboard because it is consumed by the
keyboard interrupt handler.
The patch entirely disables tty interrupts while setting LED and
typematic rate in `set_keyboard()', making the routine behave more
like the previous versions of `syscons' (versions in 2.1.X and
2.2-ALPHA, -BETA, and some -GAMMAs). The reporter said this patch
eliminated the problem.
(I also found another typo/bug, but the reporter and I found that it
wasn't the cause of the problem...)
This should go into RELENG_2_2.