Erratic touchpad

English Hardware
1

I have an HP laptop with an alps touchpad. With the libinput drivers that were installed by default with Leap 15.0 the touchpad is a bit erratic. It works for the most part but at least once a day the touchpad stops working and I have to reboot. And the cursor frequently freezes and only resumes working after I tap the touchpad repeatedly with three fingers. (In KDE the touchpad is configured by default so that a three finger tap emulates a middle mouse button.) I’m thinking of removing libinput and installing the synaptics driver instead. Is there any reason i shouldn’t do that?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

2

Anything captured in the Xorg.0.log when the touchpad stops working? If you need to reboot, then the old log becomes Xorg.1.log. It may well be that a bug report is needed here. Use ‘xinput’ to get more info about your touchpad hardware. Also, you can do something like

dmesg|egrep "i8042|touch|input"

I’m thinking of removing libinput and installing the synaptics driver instead. Is there any reason i shouldn’t do that?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Only that synaptics driver is deprecated now and libinput is actively developed for use with Wayland and Xorg. However, there is a handful of cases where ‘xf86-input-synaptics’ may be helpful.

3

Thanks for replying, Deano. I found the following in the Xorg.) log. Not sure if it’s relevant:

  1912.832] (EE) event10 - ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html for details
  3653.734] (EE) event10 - ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html for details
 14648.011] (EE) event10 - ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html for details
 14959.423] (EE) event10 - ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html for details
 15437.214] (EE) event10 - ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html for details

And here’s the result of “xinput”:

xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ALP0017:00 044E:121C Touchpad             id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse                        id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint                  id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button                              id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP HD Camera                              id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard              id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP Wireless hotkeys                       id=14   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP WMI hotkeys                            id=15   [slave  keyboard (3)]

I wonder if a newer kernel would help?

4

Which desktop are you using? I see references to Wayland here.

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

I wonder if a newer kernel would help?

Worth a shot…

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/stable/standard/ kernel

zypper dup

zypper dup -r kernel
5

BTW, did you check the reference given in your log yet?
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.5/touchpad_jumping_cursor.html

In this recording, the pointer jumps from its position 3752/2216 to 1640/4681 within a single frame. On this particular touchpad, this would represent a physical move of almost 50mm. libinput detects some of these jumps and discards the movement but otherwise continues as usual. However, the bug should be fixed at the kernel level.

6

The wayland reference is strange, since I"m running kde plasma. Maybe the “jumping cursor” issue was enough to trigger the link to the kernel bug?

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

I did try running wayland a couple of weeks ago to see if the touchpad functioned any better–I didn’t notice much difference. And there were some glitches with wayland–very small fonts and some odd window behaviors so I decided not to use it. Aside from that I’ve been logging into kde with the plasma desktop every day.

Thanks for the kernel upgrade guide–maybe I’ll give that a try. If I install a newer kernel, would that lead to any upgrade problems when the next version of Leap comes out?

7

Yes, Wayland is work in progress. I have tested it on a VM with openSUSE guest installed and it was ok-ish.

Thanks for the kernel upgrade guide–maybe I’ll give that a try. If I install a newer kernel, would that lead to any upgrade problems when the next version of Leap comes out?

No, not at all.