Sculpt Hanging On New ThinkPad

[Norman Feske]

Hi John,

> The system boots into Leitzentrale, with the Manager window, log area,
> and even component graph all displaying.  But then it freezes, not
> accepting keyboard or mouse input.
> 
> (It may be related to the USB controller, because 1) the USB stick drive
> either shows a size of 0 bytes or doesn't display at all, and 2) moving
> the mouse while Genode is starting seems to cause the system to freeze
> before Leitzentrale is displayed.)

Since you see the GUI, the input drivers (both USB HID and PS/2) have
come up, which is promising.

Just to double check that the issue is not a mundane BIOS setting, can
you please try the following?

- Press [F12] to toggle the leitzentrale
  (I guess, you have already done so)

- The BIOS may be configured to swap the layers of the F-keys and
  feature keys (volume etc.).
  Can you try pressing [Fn] + [F12]?

- The BIOS may be configured to swap [Fn] and [Ctrl].
  Can you try pressing [Ctrl] + [F12]?

- Have you tried to connect a USB keyboard and press [F12] there?

- Can you move the mouse pointer with the trackpoint?

- Can you move the mouse pointer with the track pad?

- Can you move the mouse pointer with an external USB mouse?

- The trackpoint and trackpad can be configured (i.e., disabled)
  in the BIOS. Can you please check those settings?

- On some Thinkpads, I have experienced trouble with the battery-saving
  settings in the BIOS (one can set the policy for AC and battery
  independently). It might be worthwhile to try setting "maximize
  performance" for both settings.

> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?  Is there a diagnostic tool I can
> run to give more useful info?

Given that you have a machine supported by Sculpt available, you may
give Sculpt's report_dump package a try, which periodically copies the
content of Sculpt's report file system to the default file system.

First, a USB stick with a fresh Sculpt image is booted on the fully
supported machine. Then you customize the USB stick within the running
system by expanding the USB stick's Genode partition, setting it as the
default storage location, and deploying the report_dump subsystem. The
last step triggers the installation of the report_dump package onto the
USB stick. Finally, you copy the deploy configuration from the in-memory
config file system (/config/managed/deploy) to the USB stick
(/usb-<N>/config/<VERSION>/deploy) where <VERSION> corresponds to the
Sculpt version as found in the leitzentrale at /VERSION. When booting
this prepared USB stick on your non-working machine, this deployment
configuration becomes active automatically. At this point, the Sculpt
system will copy a snapshot of the report file system to the Genode
partition of the USB stick every 10 seconds. The snapshots captured on
the USB stick can later be analyzed on another machine.

The snapshots not only contain all log messages (/report/log) but also
the reports generated by various components of the drivers subsystem and
any other deployed components. For example, with acpica present in the
deploy configuration, the battery state is captured as well.

> I will be happy to give more details on the hardware in the appropriate
> forum.  Should I open a GitHub issue?

The mailing list is perfectly fine.

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

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