Re: Keys get stuck

Jan Knutar
2008-03-13T10:00:22Z

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.

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.

I haven't encountered "forever"-stuck keys since about Fedora Core 5, I
don't remember kernel and X versions there, but I was using a PS/2
keyboard, and almost always it was something like ctrl-right that
stuck, which meant that the computer ended up switching virtual
desktops as fast as it could. Recovery involved bashing on keyboard,
trying ctrl-alt-backspace, ctrl-alt-f1 and so on until something
worked. It took many minutes to clear up, with everything trying to
redraw their windows a few hojillion times.
I hope this doesn't come back, I can cope with the bad spelling ;-)