Re: [PATCH]: Add command-line option to i8042 to completely disable it

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 12:05:04AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:05:22 -0400 Chris Lalancette <clalance@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > (I tried to send this patch to linux-input@, but it seems to be currently having
> > some problems, so I'm going directly to LKML).
> > 
> > Certain (broken) pieces of South Bridge hardware will respond to
> > i8042_read_status() on boot with 0x0, despite there not being a real i8042
> > controller hooked up in the south bridge.  This can cause the detection for the
> > i8042 to return a "phantom" device, which hangs up later initialization.  Note
> > that using "i8042.nokbd" and/or "i8042.noaux" do not help with this, since this
> > shows up during i8042_controller_check() (before either of those options are
> > checked).  This patch adds a command-line option "i8042.disable", which just
> > completely disables any checking for the i8042 controller.
> 
> That's an unfortunate fix.  Is there really no way in which we
> can auto-detect such a situation without requiring a manual
> setting?

The fact that the current detection hangs suggests that the scenario is
possible to detect.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
Director SuSE Labs