USB/ACPI problem on Compaq R3000z

[Jonathan Berry]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2005 16:39:57 -0500, Gene Czarcinski <gene at czarc.net> wrote:
> On Friday 31 December 2004 19:01, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 15:16:52 -0500, Gene Czarcinski <gene at czarc.net> wrote:
[snip]
> >
> > If you don't have the problematic BIOS (you only would with very new
> > laptops or if you upgraded), then the issue isn't there :).
> 
> I do have a very recently built R3000z so it likely has the F30 bios.  I have
> downloaded the f21 and f30 updates from HP but am leary of going "backlevel"
> to f21 when the one I have almost works.
> 
> I have "discovered" something new in that if I boot with kernel parameters:
>     acpi=off i8042.nomux
> then both the synaptics touchpad and the usb mouse works (great) but now the
> keyboard does not work (oops).

There is an intermittant issue with the keyboard not working, it
seems.  I have not seen it in a while (since I upgraded to FC3, I
believe).  You can get it working again by pressing Shift+<some_key>. 
The person who discovered the fix first used Shift+~, but since then
it seems that any key works.  I don't know if this was your problem,
but it is possible if you want to try it again.

> Some of the patches in the Fedora Core kernel hit ACPI, USB and i8042 code so
> it may well be something unique about the FC kernel.

Perhaps.  Looking quickly it seems that at least some of those
affected were using FC.

> I am going to wait a bit with doing something I consider a bit drastic in
> using the F21 bios until the holidays are over and see if I can prod some of
> the Red Hat Fedora Core kernel folks to take a look ... if this is a problem
> in FC3, then it is likely a problem in the RHEL 4 kernel as well and that is
> something that should get their attention.
> --
> Gene

Just a note: "acpi=no" is probably not a very good thing with this
laptop.  It uses ACPI to do the frequency scaling (I don't know what
it can do with APM, if anything).  So you will be stuck at 800 MHz
without it, as far as I know.

Jonathan