Re: Keys get stuck

Mike Galbraith
2008-03-13T11:28:26Z

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 11:48 +0200, Jan Knutar wrote:
> On Thursday 13 March 2008 07:42, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
> > > Just for the record, this problem started with openSUSE 10.2 for
> > > me, that's a 2.6.18 thingy. I'm a heavy xterm user, where the
> > > autorepeat gets a life of its own _occasionally_. I'm able to stop
> > > it by triggering a autorepeat manually (typical antidot reaction).
> >
> > I've seen these key repeats for years. All I ever had to do was to
> > make X run heavily enough in the presence of another (hefty) load
> > that it hits the expired array and thereby takes a serious latency
> > hit. I always considered key repeats under load to be X's quaint way
> > of saying "HEEEEELP MEEEE" ;-)
>
> I experience random repeats during heavy loads such as yum upgrade,
> which triggers a huge swapout, in Fedora Core 7 with Fedora's
> 2.6.23.14-64 on amd64, Xorg 1.3... Using USB keyboard.

Hm, dunno what all is in that kernel. Huge swapout with yum upgrade
shouldn't be happening I don't think, upgrades here certainly don't (I'm
using suses upgrade dohickey though...). I can only recommend trying
latest/greatest stock kernel.

> I'm not sure if it's the same issue or not, they don't repeat "forever"
> for me, it just makes my speeellllliingggg llllooookkk
> teerrriibbblle. Like that. Before this happens, letters usually stop
> appearing on screen as I'm typing. I usually stop typing at that point,
> since I know it will just become a mess.

Yes, that's the symptom I was refering to. If you see that under
reasonable CPU load, and _without_ major swapping going on, then I'd be
suspicious of scheduler trouble. Swap can definitely keep X off the cpu
for extended periods, and that seems to be what triggers the repeated
keys behavior. (I've never troubleshot it, so must say _seems_)

-Mike