Since the introduction of 2.79 a number of people have been experiencing intermittent keyboard lockups. The problem happened everytime a tty was respawned e.g. a modem line running on ttyS0. When a call came in, keyboard died, if one turned off the modem (AA mode) keyboard died, if one did telinit q, telinit u, keyboard died. Restarting X11 solved the problem (mouse kept working). Apparently there is some kind of a race condition for the keyboard. SOLUTION: Upgrading to sysvinit 2.84 and applying only the patches: sysvinit-2.77-md5-be.patch sysvinit-2.78-halt.patch sysvinit-2.78-md5.patch (remove second hunk as it is already in) sysvinit-2.78-autofsck.patch Three of the other patches have been already incorporated into the package (see ChangeLog). After installing 2.84 none of the lockups happen anymore and everything is working as expected. FYI
*** Bug 57482 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I have been waiting to see the upgrade (or downgrade) of the SysVinit-2.79 in rawhide but so far it is not. 2.79 is buggy as it is mentioned in the later upgrades. I also looked and no distro is using 2.79 except rawhide. I think we should either go back to 2.78 or go upto 2.8x. Just a reminder!
Going back to SysVinit 2.78-17 solved my problem too. Killing mingetty (forcing a respawn) when in X windows also reproduces this bug.
This *should* be fixed with the current 2.84-x; please reopen if it's not.