How illumos sets the keyboard type

It was recently pointed out that, while the Tribblix live image prompts you for the keyboard type, the installer doesn't carry that choice through to the installed system.

Which is right. I hadn't written any code to do that, and hadn't even thought of it. (And as I personally use a US unix keyboard then the default is just fine for me, so hadn't noticed the omission.)

So I set out to discover how to fix this. And it's a twisty little maze.

The prompt when the live image boots comes from the kbd command, called as 'kbd -s'. It does the prompt and sets the keyboard type - there's nothing external involved.

So to save that, we have to query the system. To do this, run kbd with the -t and -l arguments

# kbd -t
USB keyboard

# kbd -l
type=6
layout=33 (0x21)
delay(ms)=500
rate(ms)=40

OK, in the -l output type=6 means a USB keyboard, so that matches up. These are defined in <kbd.h>

#define KB_KLUNK        0x00            /* Micro Switch 103SD32-2 */

#define KB_VT100        0x01            /* Keytronics VT100 compatible */

#define KB_SUN2         0x02            /* Sun-2 custom keyboard */

#define KB_VT220        0x81            /* Emulation VT220 */

#define KB_VT220I       0x82            /* International VT220 Emulation */

#define KB_SUN3         3               /* Type 3 Sun keyboard */

#define KB_SUN4         4               /* Type 4 Sun keyboard */

#define KB_USB          6               /* USB keyboard */

#define KB_PC           101             /* Type 101 AT keyboard */

#define KB_ASCII        0x0F            /* Ascii terminal masquerading as kbd */

That handles the type, and basically everything today is a type 6.

Next, how is the keyboard layout matched. That's the 33 in the output. The layouts are listed in the file

/usr/share/lib/keytables/type_6/kbd_layouts

Which are a key-value map of name to number. So what we have is:

US-English=33

And if you check the source for the kbd command, 33 is the default.

Note that the numbers that kbd -s generates to prompt the user with have absolutely nothing to do with the actual type - the prompt just makes up an incrementing sequence of numbers.

So, how is this then loaded into a new system? Well, that's the keymap service, which has a method script that then calls

/usr/lib/set_keyboard_layout

(yes, it's a twisty maze). That script gets the layout by calling eeprom like so:

/usr/sbin/eeprom keyboard-layout

Now, usually you'll see:

keyboard-layout=Unknown

which is fair enough, I haven't set it.

On x86, eeprom is emulated, using the file

/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc

So, to copy the keyboard layout from the live instance to the newly

installed system, I need to:

1. Get the layout from kbd -l

2. Parse /usr/share/lib/keytables/type_6/kbd_layouts to get the name that corresponds to that number.

3. Poke that back into eeprom by inserting an entry into bootenv.rc

Oof. This is arcane.