USB Keyboard repeats keys (semi-solved)

[sevo]

As I did not ever see it mentioned here, but had one affected machine, and found workarounds elsewhere: There is a rare problem with USB keyboards on some i86 HT (and possibly SMP) machines, where keypresses may be repeated at random, in particular while there is lots of output to another console.

It seems to be due a ACPI related input buffer race condition, introduced in 2.6.12 at the very latest.

No fix right now, but there are some suggested workarounds:
1. Use ec_burst=0 or ec_burst=1 on the kernel command line
2. Use PS/2 keyboard
3. Disable ACPI/APIC
4. Disable HT
5. Downgrade kernel

ec_burst=0 improved matters somewhat for me (made X terminals workable again, but console was still unuseable), with value 1, it reportedly fixed it altogether elsewhere, but did not change anything here.

Any of the others will deal with it for good, at a price - YMMV which one is most practicable for you...

HTH somebody,
Sevo