VOGONS


First post, by Baoran

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My soyo sy-5ema+ motherboard seems to have some kind of issue with usb keyboards. I have usb keyboard support enabled in bios. In text based programs like nssi, topbench or sysinfo for example the screen suddenly gets corrupted either it gets horizontal black lines or it flattens everything and shows it corrputed at upper part of screen and only way to fix it is to return to dos and do MODE 80 to reset the text mode and that returns everything to normal. Another thing I noticed was that whenever a key is pressed on a usb keyboard the system slows down. For example in NSSI benchmark screen for example when key is pressed and if you hold any key down score goes down and it drops from 78000 dhrystones to 48000 dhrystones.

I tried 3 different video cards and 2 different usb keyboards and nothing fixed the corruption. Only thing that fixes these things is to disable usb keyboard support in bios and connect older ps2 keyboard. Any idea what could be causing this kind of thing with usb keyboards?

Reply 1 of 4, by Tiido

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When USB keyboard support is enabled the BIOS begins to emulate normal PS/2 keyboard and this will take CPU time, since USB is a bit of a complex animal compared to the dedicated interfaces.
Corruption like that shouldn't happen though, this suggests the emulation is buggy and maybe a different BIOS version fixes that but you'll still get the performance hit and only way to avoid it is to use a PS/2 keyboard (or USB one with an active converter, or a keyboard that talks PS/2 natively and can use a dumb port adapter).

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
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Reply 2 of 4, by Baoran

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Tiido wrote on 2023-07-14, 17:50:

When USB keyboard support is enabled the BIOS begins to emulate normal PS/2 keyboard and this will take CPU time, since USB is a bit of a complex animal compared to the dedicated interfaces.
Corruption like that shouldn't happen though, this suggests the emulation is buggy and maybe a different BIOS version fixes that but you'll still get the performance hit and only way to avoid it is to use a PS/2 keyboard (or USB one with an active converter, or a keyboard that talks PS/2 natively and can use a dumb port adapter).

The corruption is that either this happens:

P_20230714_205507.jpg
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P_20230714_205507.jpg
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1.68 MiB
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324 views
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

or this happens:

P_20230714_210235.jpg
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P_20230714_210235.jpg
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925.65 KiB
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324 views
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

Or both happen at the same time:

P_20230714_210309.jpg
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P_20230714_210309.jpg
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1.42 MiB
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324 views
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Fair use/fair dealing exception

It juse seems random but the idea that the keyboard is the cause was because it does not seem to happen by itself and corruption also happens right after a key press. Basically after a key press the screen goes black and picture returns corrupted.

Reply 3 of 4, by Tiido

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It isn't so much that it is the keyboard that is the cause but how BIOS is handling USB to PS/2 emulation, this is a most likely software (BIOS) related issue. Implementations that I see use SMI to do these sort of things and SMI handler, on at least intel CPUs, uses part of video range (A0000) to hold its code. Whenever SMI happens, video hardware is essentially paged out and normally inaccessible code becomes available instead, CPU does its thing there, finishes and things return as if nothing happened... but it looks like something goes wrong along the way. A different BIOS version might help here.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 4 of 4, by Baoran

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Tiido wrote on 2023-07-14, 21:49:

It isn't so much that it is the keyboard that is the cause but how BIOS is handling USB to PS/2 emulation, this is a most likely software (BIOS) related issue. Implementations that I see use SMI to do these sort of things and SMI handler, on at least intel CPUs, uses part of video range (A0000) to hold its code. Whenever SMI happens, video hardware is essentially paged out and normally inaccessible code becomes available instead, CPU does its thing there, finishes and things return as if nothing happened... but it looks like something goes wrong along the way. A different BIOS version might help here.

Thank you. I might be forced to make a choice of not using usb keyboard because I am using newest version of bios I have found and with older bios you would lose support for newer cpus.