Coreboot/Seabios cold boot laptop keyboard does not work

[Inez G]

I have setup Coreboot with Seabios to run on a Lenovo X131e laptop.  It
works fine, except for the non-responsive keyboard on cold boots.

With a warm reboot (restart) I can use the laptop keyboard to press F10 and
then specify the number for  the operating system/drive I want to boot from.
But with a cold boot (from a previously powered-off state), the laptop
keyboard does not work until I get to the password prompt in linux.  So,
with a cold boot, Seabios just defaults to boot from the first device in the
boot order.

An external USB keyboard, however, works fine (for both cold and warm
reboots) to enter F10 for the boot order and to select the OS/drive I want.

I tried setting the boot-menu-wait and the ps2-keyboard-spinup options with
times as high as 90 seconds (90,000 milli sec), but the laptop keyboard
still did not work on a cold boot.  After the 90 seconds, Seabios just
selects the first device to boot from.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:18:21PM +0000, Inez G wrote:
> I have setup Coreboot with Seabios to run on a Lenovo X131e laptop.  It
> works fine, except for the non-responsive keyboard on cold boots.
>
> With a warm reboot (restart) I can use the laptop keyboard to press F10 and
> then specify the number for  the operating system/drive I want to boot from.
> But with a cold boot (from a previously powered-off state), the laptop
> keyboard does not work until I get to the password prompt in linux.  So,
> with a cold boot, Seabios just defaults to boot from the first device in the
> boot order.
>
> An external USB keyboard, however, works fine (for both cold and warm
> reboots) to enter F10 for the boot order and to select the OS/drive I want.
>
> I tried setting the boot-menu-wait and the ps2-keyboard-spinup options with
> times as high as 90 seconds (90,000 milli sec), but the laptop keyboard
> still did not work on a cold boot.  After the 90 seconds, Seabios just
> selects the first device to boot from.
>
> Any suggestions?

You'll need to obtain the SeaBIOS log and send it to the mailing list.
This can usually be done by running "cbmem -c" from Linux after
SeaBIOS has booted.  Otherwise you'll need to connect a serial cable.

-Kevin

[Paul Menzel]

Dear Inez,

Am Mittwoch, den 16.07.2014, 23:18 +0000 schrieb Inez G:
> I have setup Coreboot with Seabios to run on a Lenovo X131e laptop.

This is great news! Congratulations! It’d be really great if you could
push patches upstream for review and inclusion. If you have any question
please contact the coreboot mailing list [1] or the coreboot IRC channe
#coreboot [2].

[…]

Thanks,

Paul

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/Mailinglist
[2] http://www.coreboot.org/IRC