> On 22 Mar 1996, Brian Blackmore wrote:
> > Pressing Alt+F3+F4 consistantly gives a "Keyboard Error" (I noticed it
> > when console switching rather rapidly) it seems to have been like this
> > ever since time began and happens with no other key combination I can
> > find. Could possibly cause problems with a game of some kind and
> > might help spot a bug elsewhere?
>
> Can't reproduce this. I pressed Alt+F3+F4 on our test server (P75, 32MB
> RAM, ASUSTeK MB) and nothing happens - it just sits there staring at me
> (you know what I mean). After, I can still do everything normally. Maybe
> bad keyboard / KB controller chip? That'd be my best guess on that one.
I can't get that particular error either with Alt+F3+F4 on either of the two
systems I tried, but I've noticed that different keyboards are picky about
different things.
In general, it's quite easy to get Linux to complain about a "keyboard
error" if you mash several keys at once. On my system, this includes
pressing all four arrow keys simultaneously, which could theoretically be
something someone might want to do in a video game.
This very seldom screws anything up, except for my screen because it prints
that annoying message. I see the "keyboard error" message is not assigned a
printk debug level in linux/drivers/char/keyboard.c; I think it should be
KERN_INFO at most, and perhaps KERN_DEBUG. The default is KERN_WARNING
right now, I believe, and this can't be filtered off your console even with
klogd running.
One system of mine, and it's the only one I've seen, will now and then lock
up completely with a "keyboard timeout" error. This completely disables
interrupts and even eg. a ping can't get through. It most often happens
during a console beep, though not always.
After a few seconds to a minute of this, it will fix itself. Really
strange, and really really annoying :( I suspect that Linux isn't
responding to keyboard timeouts very well.
This has been going on as long as I can remember, but I haven't pointed it
out because I thought it was a local hardware problem. (Probably is.) But
this thread sparked my interest...
Avery