psmouse synchronization loss under load

psmouse synchronization loss under load

[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.

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.

Re: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Bernd Eckenfels]

In article <20031220015131.GB9834@vitelus.com> 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
-- 
eckes privat - http://www.eckes.org/
Project Freefire - http://www.freefire.org/

Re: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Friday 19 December 2003 09:26 pm, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:
> In article <20031220015131.GB9834@vitelus.com> 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 

Re: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Dmitry Torokhov]

On Friday 19 December 2003 08:51 pm, Aaron Lehmann 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.
> 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

Re: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> 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. 

Re: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Aaron Lehmann]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 01:32:37PM -0500, Pavel Machek wrote:
> 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.

RE: psmouse synchronization loss under load

[Moritz Moeller-Herrmann]

I have the same problem in 2.6.1: Infrequently the mouse(rather: the 
trackpoint) jumps around and clicks wildly on the desktop.... Extremely 
annoying. The log message is identical. I do not think it is dependent on 
load. It only happens when I USE the pointer though...

I am using Debian/unstable, X-4.3, linux-2.6.1 with alsa and the DSDT-initrd 
patch on my IBM Thinkpad R31 Mobile Celeron 1,2 GHz. 

Bye, Moritz Moeller-Herrmann