NetBSD boots on a macbook air but the keyboard is unresponsive

"Greg A. Woods" <[email protected]> Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:13:01 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.x86-64
Organization Planix, Inc.
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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So I tried booting a netbsd-current from early December (11.99.4) on a
MacBookAir9,1 (A2179 core-i5) (with "userconf disable i915drmkms*" --
without that the screen gets scrambled as userland tries to start) and
finally I get to the first "sysinst" screen asking for the language for
messages.

However then as I try to proceed I find the keyboard is not doing
anything.  The only key that does anything is the power button, which
promptly shuts the system down (acpi0: entering state S5) as it should.

So, some progress over the MacBook7,1 but I'm still not running NetBSD
on any mac of mine.  :-(

I don't think the kernel is finding anything that looks like a keyboard!

I don't think it is finding the internal disk either.

There are lots of ACPI errors and unconfigured devices.

If I plug in a USB keyboard, it is probed and attaches as wskbd0 and I
can then interact with sysinst using it.

Indeed the system disk is not found.  Possibly:

Apple Computer product 2005 (miscellaneous mass storage, interface 0x02, revision 0x01) at pci4 dev 0 function 0 not configured

There are also two Apple product 1001 and 1002 listed as "miscellaneous
prehistoric"!  Dinosaurs in my laptop!

Note I'm booting from a USB adapter that lets me plug in an older USB
stick.  (I should probably get a USB-C stick and plug it in directly to
the system, but then I'd need an adapter to plug in a keyboard, and
since the USB adapter's ethernet port is found and attached so that
would be my only network device as the Broadcom wifi is not configured.)

Note that if I don't disable the i915 DRM driver the kernel starts and
then right before userland starts the screen gets completely garbled
(something like a "Matrix"(movie) screen saver in this case).  From a
video of the boot I see the last messages as:

boot device sd0
root on dk1
root filesystem type: ffs
kern.module.path:/stand/amd64/11.99.4/modules
warning: [[....path from source tree]]sys/external/bsd/drm2/dist/drm/i915/intel

Then the screen gets trashed from the top down and the system appears to
be hung (though it may not be).

--
					Greg A. Woods <[email protected]>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <[email protected]>
Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>     Avoncote Farms <[email protected]>

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