Re: Gericom Webboy Laptop Mouse/Touchpad

[Daniel Mierswa <impulze@impulze.org>]

First of all, thanks for the quick response.

> Or maybe run oprofile to try to figure out any abnormal system load?

> vmstat may provide some initial information as to what kind of activity
> exactly causes this issue.
I'm sorry. I'm not familar with those applications to get any useful 
information out of them. Any quick information on what i should be doing 
with it would be appreciated.


> Hmm, I'm pondering what I'd do here...
> Could it be that you're using the "old" IDE layer (not libata yet) and
> hdparm -u or -d or -c is inconveniently set up?

> Try configuring a different CONFIG_HZ?

> And did you try running a "barebone"-only configuration? Possibly some
> certain driver is causing this misbehaviour...
I'm already keeping the config as clean and minimal as i can imagine.

Anyway... I recompiled the kernel (2.6.22.2 now) with pure libata, 
CONFIG_HZ to 1000 (instead of 250). No effect yet.


> Or maybe it's a simple X.org scheduling issue again?
> What nice value do you run X.org at?
I'm using the default niceness which should be 10 no? I'm not re-nicing 
X if that was the question.


> In this context it would be good to ask about possible memory pressure on
> this system, too, since recently some people indicated more fluid X.org mouse
> pointer operation when mlocking the pointer handling code to avoid
> paging this code.
Well the system is low on memory (312M) but that was the last thing i 
would've been looking for since it somehow got the win32 gui and some 
games to render and work properly on it.


> Maybe run powertop to identify timer anomalies?
This shows two interesting lines:
   56.5% ( 21.6)       <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt
   11.0% (  4.2)       <interrupt> : libata


> Oh, given that IIRC the Webboy is a slightly older Gericom model which
> thus may easily be a (somewhat hotter) P4 *desktop* CPU
It's a pentium-3.
   model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
   stepping        : 10
   cpu MHz         : 1097.269


> could it be that
> you're hitting thermal emergency throttling on increased system activity?
> cat /proc/acpi/processor/*/throttling or something there might indicate
> this.
When am I supposed to check this? During idle it's like the following:
   state count:             8
   active state:            T0
   states:
      *T0:                  00%
       T1:                  12%
       T2:                  25%
       T3:                  37%
       T4:                  50%
       T5:                  62%
       T6:                  75%
       T7:                  87%

Any additional comments on this? :)
Thanks a lot.

-- 
MfG
Mierswa, Daniel