VBox and VMware send strange scancodes

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hrniels
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Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 5:18 am
Location: Marburg, Germany

VBox and VMware send strange scancodes

Post by hrniels »

Hi,

as I said in the title, VirtualBox ("Sun VirtualBox SDL GUI version 3.0.4") and VMware ("VMware Player v1.03") send strange scancodes. It works fine in qemu and bochs.
I get the "correct" scancodes for most of the keys (a-z, 0-9, space, and some other), but the arrow-keys, pageUp, pageDown, altGr and so on don't work. Some examples:

Code: Select all

key    vmware-make          vmware-break        vbox-make  vbox-break
---------------------------------------------------------------------
left   E0 38                E0 B8               E0 38      E0 B8
right  E1 1D 45             E1 9D C5            E0 46      E0 C6
up     E0 2A E0 37 E0 AA    E0 2A E0 B7 E0 AA   E0 37      E0 B7
Another strange thing is that setting the scancode-set via 0xF0 followed by 1,2 or 3 and reading the set afterwards via 0xF0 followed by 0 does not give me the set (as in qemu or bochs) but 0xFA (ACK). Don't know if this means anything...

I guess that I don't initialize the keyboard properly, but I don't know what's missing. According to various scancode-tables on the web the mentioned scancodes do not exist. What am I doing wrong? :)
If I have to live with these scancodes, I would need at least a way to determine what scancodes I'll get...

Note: ATM I'm not doing anything to initialize the keyboard. I've tried a lot of different things before which didn't make any difference. So I think it makes no sense to post them here. But if you think it would be helpfull, I can post it, of course.

Thanks!
hrniels
hrniels
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Posts: 53
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 5:18 am
Location: Marburg, Germany

Re: VBox and VMware send strange scancodes

Post by hrniels »

I've just found out that providing the command-line-option "--evdevkeymap" to VBoxSDL fixes the problem. Starting it with the VBox-GUI (not CLI) seems to do that by default, as I've just seen, so that it works there, too. So it seems that it has nothing to do with my keyboard-driver and OS. However, I have to check wether vmware provides a similar way to fix this issue. Unfortunatly I destroyed my vmware-installation a few days ago ^^, but I will report here if I have repaired the installation and checked it with it.
hrniels
Member
Member
Posts: 53
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2008 5:18 am
Location: Marburg, Germany

Re: VBox and VMware send strange scancodes

Post by hrniels »

Just for your information: I've managed it to get vmware working again :) I'm using now "VMware Player v2.5.3" and get no "strange" scancodes anymore. I guess the new version fixes the problem.
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