On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 12:05:04AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:05:22 -0400 Chris Lalancette [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

(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