Re: Debian 9 Xfce intermittent keyboard and mouse erratic behavior or lockup
On 4/20/22, Dieter Rohlfing <dr-erc@gmx.net> wrote:
> Am Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:43:35 -0700
> schrieb David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>:
>
>>I have been experiencing intermittent storms of random keyboard and
>>mouse GUI events over the past year or more:
>
> Same for me.
>
> System is Debian 9.13 (kernel 4.19.0-0.bpo.19-amd64, XFCE desktop) running
> on an ASRock DeskMini H110M.
>
> I'm running this combination with several hosts, but the storm only
> appears with the ASRock PC. Even with another mouse and keyboard the
> symptoms remain. So I think the storm mainly depends on the bare host and
> not on the peripheral components.
"Sticky keys", an accessibility feature, come to mind as needing to be
ruled out. I've accidentally triggered mine multiple times over the
last couple of years. To this day, I have no idea what combination of
keys I'm hitting that does it. I'll just see a 2-second flash of an
onscreen notification that they've been triggered on... again.
> At the moment I'm tinkering with the C-states. I disabled C6 and C7 in the
> BIOS and added the following options to the kernel command line:
>
>> processor.max_cstate=3 intel_idle.max_cstate=3
>
> Because the symptoms appear randomly, I can't say anything about a
> possible solution. I'll continue watching and will report, when I have any
> news.
I've also occasionally experienced erratic behavior that's hardware
caused by two different, unrelated instances. One has been that my
laptop keys are, for example, worn out and/or overheating and
"sticking" as though permanently depressed (being physically held
down).
The erratic appearance of this particular behavior will occur when I'm
typing out posts or whatever and incidentally hit a declared hotkey
that becomes triggered because e.g. the likewise declared CTRL key is
physically stuck in the ON position. This scenario occurs because I
have to buy old equipment that eventually overheats and causes things
like the onboard keyboard to inevitably have a limited lifetime
expectancy based meltdown.
The secondary cause for seemingly erratic behavior is easier to fix.
It's when the dogs or I are somehow leaning on any of my mouse's
buttons. That will occur sometimes when I've set the mouse down to the
side and am using a laptop's touchpad, instead. The mouse and the
touchpad will end up conflicting with each other over which one has
control of the situation.
XFCE4 just coincidentally happens to be what I'm using for the above.
My guess is that, since my situations are hardware based, they would
likely occur regardless of what desktop environment happens to be in
use at the time.
Cindy :)
--
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* runs with birdseed *
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