G5 (SMU) loss of keyboard/mouse

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 18:54 +0000, Ken Moffat wrote:
>   My latest toy is one of the last of the single processor G5s 
> (PowerMac9,1).  It works well enough to install ubuntu or fedora, but 
> once I boot the installed system I lose keyboard and mouse input in a 
> couple of minutes.
> 
>   With a raphical desktop login I lose them as soon as the graphical 
> login appears, probably because there is a sound associated with that 
> (found that from a bug filed in ubuntu, but it seems to be generic, 
> certainly the fedora install has the same problem if I try to test a 
> sound).  I also lose it if I try tab-completion in bash.  I've 
> occasionally seen ide error messages, as if the disk is no longer 
> responding.
> 
>   Running a non-graphical installation helps a bit (I had over 10 minutes 
> uptime on one occasion), as does upgrading to a cross-compiled 2.6.14.2 
> (working network - thanks for that advice, Ben - and tab-completion 
> doesn't always hang).
> 
>   I suspect this might be an unfortunate combination of options in 
> .config, so I'll start by asking if anybody has one of these machines 
> running reliably ?

The problems you are reporting look strangely similar to what was
reported by a iMac G5 rev 2 (PowerMac8,2) user. Strangely, the
PowerMac8,1 that I have here (iMac G5 rev 1) seem to be rock solid.

Is the kernel trying to load the alsa driver ? Does it help not loading
it at all ?

Did you try not using the CD/DVD-ROM drive ? For example, putting the
files form the CD on a MacOS partition or on a remote machine and doing
an HTTP install ?

Also make sure nothing is trying to load a known broken driver like
parport_pc (CUPS tend to do that)

Ben.