pckbc(4)

pckbc4

Pc (isa) keyboard controller driver

Usage

pckbc* at isa? flags 0x00 (alpha, amd64, i386, loongson) pckbc* at acpi? flags 0x00 (amd64) pckbc* at ebus? (sparc64) pckbd* at pckbc? pms* at pckbc?

Overview

The pckbc driver handles resource allocation and device attachment for the traditional PC/AT keyboard controller, or emulations thereof. It provides up to two logical connections for child devices, the “keyboard” slot for a keyboard and the “auxiliary” slot for mice (the latter might be missing in older keyboard controllers, or recent emulations).

To avoid attaching a phantom PS/2 keyboard device, the isa(4) attachment of the pckbc driver will attempt to detect USB legacy keyboard emulation on amd64 and i386 systems. Unfortunately, the detection heuristics may fail on older systems with a real PS/2 keyboard. The keyboard can be forced to attach on these systems, by changing the device flags to 1.

The acpi(4) attachment of the pckbc driver defaults to attach only where it would perform better than its legacy isa(4) attachment. Should this logic be insufficient, it is possible to force it to always attach, by changing its device flags to 1.

Releases

53 releases since OpenBSD 2.9; the text changed 11 times.

  1. 2.9
  2. 3.0
  3. 3.1
  4. 3.2
  5. 3.3
  6. 3.4
  7. 3.5
  8. 3.6–4.1
  9. 4.2–4.7
  10. 4.8
  11. 4.9–7.6
  12. 7.7–8.0

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.