"No keyboard present"

Okay a really minor thing, but the Pi always prints this. I am guessing it’s because it doesn’t have an Archimdedes or PS/2 Keyboard so whatever the detection mechanism is, it won’t find it.

Do other systems display the message? It’s a trivial thing but maybe in the age of USB keyboards (and I am guessing the USB hasn’t started at that point) maybe we should just ignore the lack of keyboard?

Does that mean on a RPi holding down shift won’t may any difference (and in fact it will just always act as if ‘boot’ was configured)?

On the RPi the USB stack does not have the keyboard in the HAL.

I wonder if the Pi only supporting “boot mode” USB keyboards / keyboard components of multi devices has something to do with that.

On the RPi the USB stack does not have the keyboard in the HAL.

That shouldn’t be a problem any more. A while ago (September 2017) the ROM boot was tweaked so that the OS will start the keyboard driver modules “early” and use those for doing the boot-time keyboard scan. So the HALs no longer have to implement their own keyboard scan code.

Any Pi image running RISC OS 5.24 or later should contain the code (I don’t think it made it into any of the earlier RC versions)