I have come across a strange problem on my WBEL system (dual PIII, 2Gb Ram, 2.4.21-27smp kernel, all latest patches). When I boot it up I can use the keyboard to select in Grub, I can use the keyboard while booting to 'press Y to force filesystem check', but when I get to the login prompt all keyboard input is ignored. There's normally no need for the keyboard to work, but this server was last used to run a hlds at a Lan event and I wanted to change the IP back to the same subnet as my network (which is why I didn't just SSH in in the first place). Once I'd reconfigured another machine so I could SSH in and manually change the IP I tried init 5 to see what GDM did, but keyboard and mouse were completely unresponsive.

I tried using a different keyboard, I tried upgrading to the latest kernel and I had a Google, which found several people with similar problems but no actual solutions, I tried using a USB mouse. I then tried booting with the standard (non-multiprocessor) kernel and found that everything worked fine. Armed with some new search terms I came across this post, I tried adding 'noapic' to my kernel options and my keyboard was once again fully functional. Mouse still doesn't work though...