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psmouse synchronization loss under load

DISCUSSION Aaron Lehmann 4 participants 6 messages Dec 20, 2003 – Jan 13, 2004

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#0 lore raw

On a Dell laptop whenever I run a program that takes the full CPU, my mouse pointer goes insane and thrashes my X session every few minutes. It seems to have a mind of its own and always be able to make it to the Exit item in the root menu ;). Whenever this happens, psmouse logs and detects the error:

psmouse.c: Mouse at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 2 bytes away.

The pointing device itself is a Synaptics touchpad. I don't use the synaptics driver because every time I've tried it (intentionally and when forced to by older development kernels) it simply rendered the touchpad inoperative.

I'm running a late snapshot of 2.6.0-test11 which for all intents and purposes is the same as 2.6.0. The problem that I described happens with other versions of the 2.6.0-test series. I upgraded to this snapshot a few days ago to make sure I could reproduce the problem.

#1 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · In article <[email protected]> you wrote:

On a Dell laptop whenever I run a program that takes the full CPU, my mouse pointer goes insane and thrashes my X session every few minutes.

On my older system with 2.6.0 kernel i have currently this problem, whenever APM tries to suspend the system. It will log that it was busy (screen shortly gets black) and after that the genius ps2 mouse behaves like you expected. Unplugging it helps.

The funny thing for me is, that those APM suspends most often only happen if I actually _do_ something. I can reproduce it with Mozilla very often, especially on loading flash sites. I guess I can solve that problem with reconfiguring some of the APM options (I have tried to turn on as much as possible on that PII4X 440BX System.

The sync problem with the mouse I have never seen with 2.4 kernels, not even after suspends.

Greetings
Bernd

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · Bernd Eckenfels
Quoted 3 lines · In article <[email protected]> you wrote:

On a Dell laptop whenever I run a program that takes the full CPU, my mouse pointer goes insane and thrashes my X session every few minutes.

On my older system with 2.6.0 kernel i have currently this problem, whenever APM tries to suspend the system. It will log that it was busy (screen shortly gets black) and after that the genius ps2 mouse behaves like you expected. Unplugging it helps.

You might want to give my input patches a try. Although they unlikely to fix the problem that you can't suspend they should correctly restore keyboard and mouse (PS/2) on resume (both APM and new suspend methods supported) and I am very interested in results.

The patches are at http://www.geocities.com/dt_or/input
They are against -test11 but I think will apply to 2.6.0-final.

Dmitry

#3 lore raw
In reply to Aaron Lehmann
Quoted 9 lines · Aaron Lehmann

On a Dell laptop whenever I run a program that takes the full CPU, my mouse pointer goes insane and thrashes my X session every few minutes. It seems to have a mind of its own and always be able to make it to the Exit item in the root menu ;). Whenever this happens, psmouse logs and detects the error:

psmouse.c: Mouse at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 2 bytes away.

That means that mouse interrupt hasn't been serviced for more than 0.5 seconds. You could try commenting out that piece of code in drivers/input/mouse/psmouse-base.c but I think that's a sign that something else is going on in the kernel - 0.5 sec is pretty long.

Dmitry

#4 lore raw
In reply to Aaron Lehmann

Hi!

Quoted 8 lines

On a Dell laptop whenever I run a program that takes the full CPU, my mouse pointer goes insane and thrashes my X session every few minutes. It seems to have a mind of its own and always be able to make it to the Exit item in the root menu ;). Whenever this happens, psmouse logs and detects the error:

psmouse.c: Mouse at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 2 bytes away.

Do you use ACPI? Using APM made the error go away for me.

#5 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · Pavel Machek

Do you use ACPI? Using APM made the error go away for me.

No, I don't. I was also seeing abrupt poweroffs under load so I cleaned out the ventilation paths inside the machine. This made both problems go away. Probably a weird software or hardware reaction to the heat.