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Problems using your USB keyboard after installing IRLP on a Raspberry Pi
This article describes the background, symptoms, causes, and a workaround for issues with your USB keyboard after installing IRLP on a Raspberry Pi.
Background
The USB subsystem in the Raspberry Pi is poorly implemented. It uses a flaky host controller, and is prone to issues with anything that requires decent bandwidth (like audio, Ethernet, etc). Its limitations are well known and documented, particularly issues with using USB sound cards. As the IRLP implementation on the Pi requires a USB sound card, certain things have to be done to the Pi for seamless audio.
In order to have seamless audio, it is required to turn down the speed of the USB host controller, which prevents the need to “resend” lost packets. This is accomplished by adding a boot-time parameter to the SD card.
Some info on other people that have had the issue is available at the following website: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/4090/how-can-dwc-otg-speed-1-be-made-to-work
Symptoms
There are a few symptoms you may see:
- The same USB keyboard you used for the initial setup (before executing the get-irlp-files script) no longer works.
- On initial boot up, your node does not say its IP address.
- The USB keyboard does not work properly (some keys are transposed, keys are missed, reaction time is slow).
Causes
The most likely cause is