No input devices after xorg-server upgrade on FreeBSD

Some days ago I ran my regular pkg upgrade command under FreeBSD and lost my input devices under X11 (Xorg). :-(

However with help from several people we were able to find a fix for it.

Symptoms

This happened on several machines all running the NVIDIA driver. The symptoms included either completely “black out” (i.e. X crashed) or the loss of the input devices. The latter included no mouse and no keyboard or weird characters appearing after each key press rendering the keyboard unusable.

Solution

Several steps were necessary to solve the problem. You might want to download the checker script from https://github.com/grembo/xorg-udev-setup-check which will guide you during the process.

1. Setting the kern.evdev.rcpt_mask=12 value via sysctl as mentioned in the package message. (You might experiment with setting it to 6 though.)
2. Install possibly missing xf86-input- packages (namely xf86-input-libinput).
3. Fix X configuration files which messed up the things.

Regarding the last point I completely removed my custom mouse configuration and changed my keyboard configuration from this:

Section "InputClass"
	Identifier              "Keyboard Defaults"
	Driver                  "keyboard"
	MatchIsKeyboard         "on"
	Option                  "XkbModel"   "microsoft4000"
	Option                  "XkbLayout"  "de"
	Option                  "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
EndSection

Into this one:

Section "InputClass"
	Identifier              "Keyboard Defaults"
	MatchIsKeyboard         "yes"
	Option                  "XkbLayout"  "de"
	Option                  "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
EndSection

I’ve lost some multimedia keys during this but have usable workstations again. :-)

For further reference see the main issue on the FreeBSD bug tracker: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=196678