Fedora 13 usb key failure

[Jack Howarth]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 02:18:33PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> O> At that point, after the installer's vmlinux has been
> > booted, the keystrokes on the usb keyboard are not
> > recognized when attempting to select the installation
> > media check options. This is quite odd because the
> > same usb keyboard is usable earlier in the installation
> 
> Odd it may see but not unexpected. Until the kernel loads the BIOS is
> doing emulation of a PC keyboard via USB. After the kernel USB loads the
> OS takes over control. If that fails you have a problem.
> 
> >   Is there any workaround for this (as the Sun workstation
> > only has usb ports for keyboard and mouse) short of
> > waiting for Fedora 14?
> 
> I guess a serial or vnc based network install might be helpful for
> debugging but hardly useful for production.
> 
> Try booting with the option "irqpoll" just in case the USB stuff is
> having interrupt problems.

Alan,
   I did clean install of x86_64 Fedora 13 onto the Sun W2100Z dual
opteron while booted with acpi=off so that the usb keyboard would
work in the installer. The installation completed successfully but
I do see the message...

pci 0000:08:00.0: address space collision: [mem 0xd8000000-0xdfffffff pref] already in use
pci 0000:08:00.0: can't reserve [mem 0xd8000000-0xdfffffff pref]

during the boot process. Since the graphics resolution with the nouveau driver
doesn't autodetect the larger screen resolutions with acpi=off, I tried booting
with that disabled. Interestingly, if I stop the boot process to edit the kernel
options (removing 'acpi=off' that way), the usb keyboard and mouse is non-functional
at boot. However, if I boot with acpi=off and remove 'acpi=off' from grub.conf, the
machine boots with a usable usb keyboard and mouse. Also, the context
for the address space collision is...

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
usbcore: registered new device driver usb
PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing
PCI: pci_cache_line_size set to 64 bytes
pci 0000:08:00.0: address space collision: [mem 0xd8000000-0xdfffffff pref] already in use
pci 0000:08:00.0: can't reserve [mem 0xd8000000-0xdfffffff pref]

Any suggestions for debugging this further? So far the problem seems to be
triggered after installation by invoking the grub boot screen (with the escape
key) followed by booting into Fedora 13 without 'acpi=off'. If I don't interrupt
the boot, ie stay out of the grub boot screen, the boot proceeds normally
with a usable usb mouse and keyboard. Odd.
                Jack