Gericom Webboy Laptop Mouse/Touchpad

Gericom Webboy Laptop Mouse/Touchpad

[Daniel Mierswa]

Hi there,
i'm having troubles getting my mouse and/or touchpad to work with 
2.6.21.5 (and older ones). It's putting the following line into dmesg 
everytime the laptop gets lots of I/O or cpu load.
"psmouse.c: Wheel Mouse at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost synchronization, 
throwing 2 bytes away."
This happens for the touchpad and a newly brought PS/2 mouse. The cursor 
(be it gpm or X11) acts weird as in jumping around and clicking around 
without doing anything to it. As i searched about the string on google i 
found various tipps by removing ACPI (or even PM) from the kernel and retry.
I've tried following setups:
  No Power Management
  ACPI
  APM
  other clocksources (pit, tsc, acpi_pm)
The problem still exists and seems to occur as i've mentioned on lots of 
disk i/o and/or cpu load.
This is a laptop which is not supported by the manufactur anymore (seems 
to be a Gericom Webboy). I would appreciate any tips to debug this further.
Please post back for any additional information you need.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
MfG
Mierswa, Daniel

Re: Gericom Webboy Laptop Mouse/Touchpad

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 09:54:03PM +0200, Daniel Mierswa wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> i'm having troubles getting my mouse and/or touchpad to work with 
> 2.6.21.5 (and older ones). It's putting the following line into dmesg 
> everytime the laptop gets lots of I/O or cpu load.
> "psmouse.c: Wheel Mouse at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost synchronization, 
> throwing 2 bytes away."

This message is a wee bit too familiar to me as well, albeit for reasons
different to that, I believe. :-$

> The problem still exists and seems to occur as i've mentioned on lots of 
> disk i/o and/or cpu load.
> This is a laptop which is not supported by the manufactur anymore (seems 
> to be a Gericom Webboy). I would appreciate any tips to debug this further.
> Please post back for any additional information you need.

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?

Maybe run powertop to identify timer anomalies?
Try configuring a different CONFIG_HZ?
Or maybe run oprofile to try to figure out any abnormal system load?
And did you try running a "barebone"-only configuration? Possibly some
certain driver is causing this misbehaviour...
vmstat may provide some initial information as to what kind of activity
exactly causes this issue.

Or maybe it's a simple X.org scheduling issue again?
What nice value do you run X.org at?
If it's too low, then maybe this causes the psmouse.c driver to have its
mouse queue(?) processing get stuck and makes it have a hickup?
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.

Oh, given that IIRC the Webboy is a slightly older Gericom model which
thus may easily be a (somewhat hotter) P4 *desktop* CPU: 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.

HTH,

Andreas Mohr

Re: Gericom Webboy Laptop Mouse/Touchpad

[Daniel Mierswa]

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