Spyke
mlg
lemmy.world

PS/2 Port on its way to harass the CPU

80
Aganimreply
lemmy.world

Seems the CPU has become the bully these days:

CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
Keyboard: E
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
CPU: hey keyboard do you have anything for me?
..

43
lemmy.zip

My grandpa always used to say that computers used to be way better before they became electrical.

9
SmokeyDopereply
lemmy.world

Ah, yes the good ol days of punch cards, switch boards, mechanical operators and electron tubes, when will the youngins learn that their fancy transistors are for pussies

Personally I inscribe all of my code into binary on a fired clay tablet and store it in a cave for archival purposes

7
Rodeoreply
lemmy.ca

Low level accountants in the early 20th century.

No binary monstrosity could ever replace just doing it in your head.

3

I always appreciated Dunes idea of a mentat, basically an accountant trained from birth and juiced up on brain steroids to have equal computing ability to a high level AI. Usually when I think of the way human conciousness may evolve and trancend its current capabilities my mind goes right to the psychadellic-bro conciousness expansion and non-localized astral projection stuff, its interesting to consider there are other potential paths to augmenting human conciousness and what other boundaries could be pushed.

5

Ah, a man of abundant class. How wondrous to run into you on this platform.

4
Fridgeratrreply
lemmy.world

Modern USB keyboards need to be asked what's being pressed by the CPU multiple times a second, but old PS/2 keyboards will actually interrupt the CPU to send the key press command

103
0x4E4Freply
sh.itjust.works

Oh, didn't actually know what's being done behind the scene...

Why is this relevant to Linux only?

13
renzevreply
lemmy.world

It's kind of a tradition among the r*ddit refugees from s*bs like linuxmemes and linuxmasterrace. Posting things that aren't strictly linux-related, but would still be appreciated in general by computer nerds.

3
Turunreply
feddit.de

Why e in this context? I have seen sei() and cli() before, but not E.

2
marcosreply
lemmy.world

That's the very important information you got from the keyboard.

Some context may come later, but it will take ages.

29

Thanks, apparently I can't read. I somehow missed the top right yellow speech bubble.

2
danreply
upvote.au

PS/2 still works the same as it always has. No changes there. It's not really possible to change how PS/2 operates because it wouldn't be backwards compatible with old keyboards or software.

Legacy stuff sticks around for a while and generally doesn't change, since it needs to retain backwards compatibility. Modern x86 processors also still have a "real mode" with 1MB RAM max, like what the 286 versions of DOS and Windows 3.0 used to use.

You can buy industrial PCs and motherboards today that not only have a PS/2 port, but also other legacy stuff like parallel and serial ports, ISA slots, etc. There's actually motherboards that have ISA, PCI, and PCIe all on the same board. There's 25+ year old machinery that's still in use and extremely expensive to replace, so it's not uncommon to have new computers with legacy connectors/ports in industrial environments.

24
TwanHEreply
lemmy.world

Enthusiast motherboards still have the ps/2 ports as well. Usually because the usb controller is the first thing to stop working when the bclk gets too high or you're going sub 0 cooling.

11

PS/2 keyboards are more likely to support n-key rollover, too (USB is maximum 6-key rollover by default).

3
A7thStonereply
lemmy.world

I was surprised when I just bought a brand new workstation and it had PS/2 ports.

4

Apparently some enthusiasts still use PS/2 keyboards because they have slightly faster response times / lower latency, and better support for n-key rollover.

5

Recently did OSDEV on my machine running an ryzen 5 series. I was rolling my own bootloader and I still had to enable the A20 Line

3

The absolute lowest level of computers haven't changed much, we still fuck around with interrupts. However, USB peripherals are a LOT more complicated than this, and if I'm not mistaken they're polled by the connection master

7

We still kinda do, just depends on the kernel you're using. On Windows any IRQL > 2 is pretty much instant like the bird

4
E!!!!! | Spyke