Your ramdisk-kernel dmesg tells me several things:
- You're using the i386 architecture -- this wasn't mentioned before, though I knew you were using one of the archs available on CD.
- The BIOS on your PC is from 2004.
- You have 768MB of RAM and an Intel CPU.
- Your PC hardware supports either APM for power or ACPI for power and hardware management. More on this below.
- Your wireless NIC is connected via Cardbus, and uses the AR5413 chipset.
Your bad dmesg from the installed system is disconcerting, as it points to a memory overlay. Check the contents of /var/run/dmesg.boot, and see if you can find a valid dmesg in that file. It is created by
rc(8) shortly after the system boots into multi-user mode.
Support for your AR5413 chipset was added to OpenBSD in 2006. There have been no bug reports (or complaints on the misc@ mailing list) for the software supporting the chipset, and there have been no patches to the chipset driver in six months.
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APM = "Advanced Power Management"
ACPI = "Advanced Configuration and Power Management"
APM is an an older, and a better-followed standard by hardware manufacturers. It is used to manage power consumption. ACPI is newer, has significantly more capabilities and functionality, but has varying interpretations by hardware manufacturers.
- Some PCs only have hardware for APM, some only have hardware for ACPI. Due to the weak-standards-interpretation of ACPI, the default OpenBSD kernels will use APM and not use ACPI if the hardware has both.
- Sometimes, proper operation of an individual PC requires ACPI be enabled and used.
- Sometimes, proper operation of an individual PC requires that ACPI be disabled.
In your case, we would like to see if enabling ACPI (by disabling APM) solves one or more of your problems.
To disable APM in the kernel:
At the boot> prompt, type:
boot> -c
This will boot the /bsd kernel, but bring up the User Kernel Configurator before the kernel does much hardware probing. At the UKC> prompts, type:
UKC> disable apm
UKC> quit
You should see a somewhat different dmesg, due to ACPI being used. Let us know if your keyboard controller problem, dmesg(8) output, or ifconfig behavior changes. If things change for the positive, you can make the change permanent by using the
config(8) tool, e.g.:
# config -euf /bsd
UKC> quit