Bug 151509

Please disable legacy usb device in bios again.

[note: the following instructions presume the use of grub as a bootloader]

After you've done this, when you get to the grub kernel selection screen, please
move to the kernel you want to be using (2.6.8-5.EL, I would imagine), and type
'a' to add text to the kernel line in question. 

Enter "reboot=[letter]". Instead of '[letter], however, you will want to use one
of 'w', 'c', 'b', or 'h'.

'w' will cause rebooting from the kernel with that added to its commandline to
use a 'warm' reboot, which does not test memory or other similar pre-booting
type behaviors.
'c' will cause the use of a 'cold' reboot, which will do the memory testing and
other pre-booting behaviors which are skipped with a 'warm' reboot.
'b' will cause the use of a 'bios' reboot, which will jump through the BIOS as
part of the reboot process.
'h' will cause the use of a 'hard' reboot, by toggling RESET or crashing the CPU
(not a terribly nice sounding reboot method, I'd think).

One of these should solve your problem. Once you figure out which one does what
you want it to, please edit your /etc/grub.conf file and add the appropriate
"reboot=[letter]" piece to the kernel line.

Thank you for the suggestion. However, I have tried all the above reboot options
from grub (before filing this bug), but reboot still fails. Eventhough I am
pretty sure I have tested warm, cold, bios, and hard, I will try these one more
time to make sure I have not missed anything, and will report the results.

Also when I did man bootparam:
reboot=[warm|cold][,[bios|hard]]â
       (Only  when  CONFIG_BUGi386  is defined.)  Since 2.0.22 a reboot is by
       default  a  cold  reboot.   One  asks  for  the   old   default   with
       âreboot=warmâ.   (A cold reboot may be required to reset certain hard-
       ware, but might destroy not yet written data in a disk cache.  A  warm
       reboot  may  be  faster.)   By default a reboot is hard, by asking the
       keyboard controller to pulse the reset line low, but there is at least
       one   type   of  motherboard  where  that  doesnât  work.  The  option
       âreboot=biosâ will instead jump through the BIOS.

I get the above and I know that CONFIG_BUGi386 is not defined at least not in
.config. I am using kernel 2.6.9-5.EL. Does this matter? In other words I am not
sure if the above reboot parameters do anything.

Thanks.

I now have tested all 4 possibilities for kernel reboot parameters, namely, 'b',
'h', 'c', and 'w', and non work. So the current stat is that either I disable
the support for legacy usb-devices in bios, resulting in reboot failure, or the
touchpad is not recognized and does not work. By the way my cpu is p4-ht, and I
have tested both the single processor as well as the smp version of kernel.

Thanks.

I finally got around building kernel 2.6.10 with psmouse as a module and then
loading it in rc.local, with support for legacy usb devices turned on in bios
(this used make touchpad not work). The touchpad was recognized and the laptop
reboots just fine. It seems that psmouse needs to be loaded after the usb
drivers, else the touchpad will not be recognized. Is there anyway to get the
sources to the latest kernel in RHEL-4? Thanks.

latest sources are at: http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/rhel4/SRPMS.kernel/

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