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Keyboard locks up every time inittab is re-read or re-executed. If one executes the command telinit q for example, about a second or two later keybaord is locked. The problem could be that mingetty and X11 are competing for the keyboard. When this happens on gets the message "Id 1 respawning too fast......" This is all recent rawhide stuff and there was one one person who reported this to bugzilla earlier. I also saw few other people on the news group with the same configuration. I have a Dell Precision 330 system but I am not sure of the others. Same computer worked fine with 7.2 and later rawhides but started this about 1.5 months ago.
The only thing I can think of that might cause such a problem is a misconfigured PS/2 mouse, while using a PS/2 keyboard. This can mess up the keyboard controller as well. Dunno if that is relevant or not, just a data point.
Well, there was a thread on this in one of the redhat news groups. The problem is with the 2.4.9-13 kernel....and switching to 2.4.17 kernel SOLVES the problem. I just tested it. FYI
OK, assigning to kernel.
Keyboard lockups are still happening with latest rawhide. People in the news group claim running the stock kernel 2.4.17 solved their problem. Here is EXACTLY what happens and why it wan't happen to everybody: If you are using an external modem via mgetty or uugetty (say port ttyS0). Every time mgetty is respawned (call comes in) keyboard locks up. If you physically kill mgetty or uugetty (kill -9 PidOfMgetty) the keyboard lock instantly. Since the same thing is happening with both mgetty and getty_ps packages (compiled on rawhide) this seems like some problem with inittab unless it is some kind of a lock problem. Somehow the keyboard grabbing is competing with X and locking the keyboard. I hope we can find a solution since this is pretty annoying.
SOLVED!!! Finally I tracked it down to SysVinit-2.79-x. I upgraded sysvinit to 2.84 and all is welll now. None of the things above cause this race condition. I am closing this and will report to packager of SysVinit as a new bug.