Re: Scroll Wheel not working in v4... [Solved...sort of]

[Clorden <clorden altern org>]

On Sunday 03 July 2005 03:57, Tom Sightler wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 14:15 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> > > I keep my fingers crossed...  But I get the feeling it will require an
> > > opening of the wallet.  :-)
> >
> > And the answer was...a new KVM switch.
>
> Well, I have no doubt that is "a" answer, but I'm not sure it's "the"
> answer.  It still looks like a kernel bug to me, or a least a missing
> feature.

Sorry I did not read this thread before. This KVM/mouse issue is an old 2.6.x 
kernel related... ahem... "feature".

All 2.6.x kernels have problems when dealing with many KVM due to the fact 
that certain KVMs do not fully respect the PS/2 standard while 2.6.x kernels 
are much more "standard-compliant" than 2.4.x kernels.

Google is your friend should you need more info.

> Oh well, at least your immediate problem is solved.  I may see if I can
> reproduce this problem with one of the old Belkin KVM's we have lying
> around the office.  If so, it's probably easy to write up a patch to
> allow a "proto=force" option to the mouse driver.

The problem was solved in 2.6.11/12 kernels. If you are using a pre-2.6.11 
kernel (such as the AS4's 2.6.9-11) you can avoid the mouse going crazy 
booting with this parameter:

psmouse.proto=bare

Obviously your fancy mouse features (wheels and so on) are lost this way.

RedHat seems to have ignored this issue and its solution even in the last 
2.6.9-11 kernel, since they did not backport the new 2.6.11/12 kernel code to 
it. Maybe it is too difficult or untested?

KVMs are a widespread solution in many datacenters, and it would be very 
useful to have those mouse wheels work again... ;)

Thanks.

--Clorden