[syslinux] Making Syslinux boot with missing keyboard, but not disabled keyboard.

[Michael Knaus]

Hello together,

first thanks a lot for your work. It's quite useful on some projects. I
encouraged myself to ask you a question:

Think I've seen Syslinux booting fli4l on Systems without keyboard,
where "keyboard option" has been set to "not installed" in the Bios.
There are lot of boards around, e.g. with award bios like those 486 UMC
based on UMC 8881/8886, without this Bios option. Syslinux starts
booting on these machines, if Bios is set to "Ignore all Errors" or
"Ignore all Errors but keyboard". This is recommended by the Award Bios
docs and the manual (if present).

But Syslinux hangs while booting fli4l after loading the root.fs after
having displayed the third dot.

Is it possible, to enable all these machines booting without keyboard?

I don't know, if that's an A20 gate problem, perhaps Syslinux thinks,
there is a keyboard, cause it has been started by Bios and Bios perhaps
tells Syslinux there is a keyboard.
A timeout could help. Or an option in syslinux.cfg or an option passed
to Syslinux while writing the floppy.

This would help a lot of people of all these Linux Router Projects,
using 486 or older hardware and having to destroy a keyboard (AT
Keyboards get rare) with a hammer, just to get this chip out of the
keyboard and have it connected to the keyboard connector.

I would appreciate pretty much a short notice, what you think is the
problem, and if or how I can help and if you want to care about this.

Kind regards

Michael

mailto:info at michael-knaus.de