Arch Linux

swansone

Member

Registered: 2016-09-20

Posts: 3

System upgrade left keyboard unusable at tty. Kernel Downgrade fixed.

Hi everyone. This is my first post on the forums. I've been enjoying Arch for a couple weeks now, but this experience left me with a few questions.

My Situation:

I've happily configured a working system that boots to a tty. Typically I login there and start xmonad with startx. I've recently been mucking around with my touchpad settings, and decided to do a reboot. When I was dropped to the login prompt my keyboard didn't work at all. I could not enter my username with either the laptop's built in keyboard (macbook air 2014), or a usb keyboard.

The keyboard still worked at the boot menu, but wouldn't do anything once I reached tty1.

My Solution:
I was able to live boot into my Arch usb and chroot to the system. I mucked around for a bit, looking at any changes in input drivers, downgrading/uninstalling some of them. None of that worked.

Eventually I downgraded linux (4.7.4-1 -> 4.7.2-1). Once I did that, I was able to use the keyboard to login as usual. After this, I added a line to /etc/pacman.conf

IgnorePkg = linux

Which I understand should prevent a kernel upgrade from happening again.

My questions:

• Is it unusual that doing an upgrade like this breaks something as fundamental as keyboard input?

• When I run into something like this, what is the correct response? Should I prevent the linux kernel from updating like I did? How long should I wait before trying again?

• Is this something it's appropriate to file a bug report over?

• Is there anything further I could have done to debug the issue besides randomly downgrading the kernel?

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,791

Re: System upgrade left keyboard unusable at tty. Kernel Downgrade fixed.

I'll bet your boot partition was not mounted on /boot when you updated your kernel.  Next time you booted, the boot loader found the old kernel, but that kernel could no longer find its modules because you updated them.   When you downgraded, you restored the old kernel modules and the old kernel from the boot *PARTITION* could now find the correct modules.

So, mount your boot partition.  Fix your /etc/fstab so it happens automatically. Update your kernel. Reboot.  And --- welcome to Arch Linux

Last edited by ewaller (2016-09-20 03:40:41)

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