I ended up getting one of the latest Toshiba laptop models recently
(off-topic note: I no longer recommend buying laptops from Toshiba;
crappy keyboard electronics are not the only mind-numbingly broken
thing about them, despite the sexy technical specs) to help my SO cope
with a sudden emergency, and wanted to note in general a few
experiences and add a pointer in the bug tracking system to one Alan
Cox's changelogs. I won't be able to give much more specific
information until she gets back with it in a couple weeks.
Console typing had no problems. In X, it was seriously bouncy, not
just doubled keystrokes, but frequently three or four. The
XKbDisabled option had no visible effect, neither by entry in the
XF86Config-4 file, nor by command line. Changing the key repeat
settings, either with xset or with the gnome utilities, had very
little effect on the bouncing.
Using a bounce protection tool such as AccessX helped quite a bit, but
did not completely eliminate the problem, and it was still pretty much
impossible to touch type a full line without seeing at least one
bounce. Applying the patch as posted in the bug tracking system
*almost* entirely eliminated the problem: under most circumstances,
the bouncing was eliminated, but if there was heavy CPU or disk usage,
to the point that XFree86 would pause for a moment, there would still
be a flurry of repeated keys. From this, I'm guessing that there are
problems both with multiple keypress signals (fixed by the kernel
patch) *and* with XFree86 having less than ideal handling of key
release events when under load -- they didn't seem to get completely
lost, but certainly got delayed. Still, this turned out to be good
enough to get work done. What I really wish I understood was why the
console *doesn't* behave this way.
Finally, the correction to this may eventually start making it into
standard upstream kernels, as fourth-to-last entry in the following
changelog seems directly relevant:
Linux 2.4.21pre3-ac3
o Address comments on wcache value/issuing (me)
cache flush requests
o Update credits entry for Stelian Pop (Stelian Pop)
o Backport some sonypi improvements from 2.5 (Kunihiko IMAI)
o Fix pdcraid/silraid symbol clash (Arjan van de Ven)
o Fix ehci build with older gcc (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Fix via 8233/5 hang (me)
o Fix non SMP cpufreq build (Eyal Lebidinsky)
o Fix sbp2 build with some config options (Eyal Lebidinsky)
o Fix ATM build bugs (Francois Romieu)
o Fix an ipc/sem.c race (Bernhard Kaindl)
o Fix toshiba keyboard double release (Unknown)
o CPUFreq updates/fixes (Dominik Brodowski)
o Natsemi Geode/Cyrix MediaGX cpufreq support (Hiroshi Miura,
Zwane Mwaikambo)
o Add frequency table helpers to CPUfreq (Dominik Brodowski)
--
Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org>
PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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