USB joystick causes boot to fail

Using a recent build of 5.29 (currently July, but I think the August one was the same).

My keyboard is a pretty unexciting generic UK layout USB keyboard. It works without any problems.

The joystick is a cheap SNES-style device marked “GeeekPi” (not a typo!), one of those mass-produced in China jobbies.

The joystick appears to be pretty much inactive until the USBJoystick module is loaded. It doesn’t control the mouse or anything like that.

However, when it is connected, the machine fails a cold boot with the following problem:

[larger size, better quality (680×382)]

If I remember correctly, the two characters at the prompt are not the same (I think the previous time it was “àe”?), but the behaviour is always the same – it’ll abort and end up at the command line with two characters having “been entered”.

This only happens from a cold boot. I emphasise cold as power cycling (even for a count of thirty) doesn’t appear to trigger it.

Remove the joystick, the machine starts up as expected.

I don’t have any other diagnostics at this time. If I had been thinking, I’d have tried *Modules and *. to see what sort of state the machine was in, but I was too busy swearing in three languages as a self-restarting system is kind of a necessity for me, given the sometimes shonky rural power…