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]> |
--pgp-sign-Multipart_Mon_Feb_23_13:12:53_2026-1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII 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]> --pgp-sign-Multipart_Mon_Feb_23_13:12:53_2026-1 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: OpenPGP Digital Signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iF0EABECAB0WIQRuK6dmwVAucmRxuh9mfXG3eL/0fwUCaZzC1wAKCRBmfXG3eL/0 fzYVAJ9ROIkcCf7Sv0/6vJC0bN3FR5IknQCfRu5UEvfIMfXWgr4USj1WtYcZCok= =gG27 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --pgp-sign-Multipart_Mon_Feb_23_13:12:53_2026-1--