ketboard repeat problem in Xen

English Virtualization
1

When runing xen on openSuSE 13.2 with a openSuSE 10 guest sometimes when running a curses based application there is a key repeat problem as if an arrow or a number is continuously being pressed. The only way to fix this is to ssh in from another computer and kill the process that is running and closing the terminal session running this.

It there a patch for this problem and if so where can I get it for openSuSE 13.2?

Any help would be appreciated.

2

Still running OpenSuSE 10.x?
On general principles, it would probably be a good idea to investigate if your app will run on a later, preferable supported version of openSUSE.

The only time I’ve seen something like what you describe is if there is a latency issue, either network or system.
Would require some investigation only you can do, such as inspecting available resources, running top, free.

TSU

3

The application runs on an informix database which is too costly to upgrade to the latest version and the support agreement we had ran out on version 10.

We are looking at using XEN and running openSuSE 10 on the VM but this keyboard repeat error is stopping us. It is an intermittent problem running perfectly fine sometimes but falling over on other occaisions.

4

Using such an old, outdated version of openSUSE might introduce unexpected and unusual complications.

Without knowing exactly the cause of your issue, I’d recommend trying

  • Different hardware if you have a few machines If they’re truly unused and available for now, try on all of them. That’s one of the advantages of virtualization, you can make copies of the machine and deploy them. Just keep in mind that if you don’t run them on isolated networks, each machine needs to be unique on the network.

  • Different virtualiztion technologies. It’s not necessarily as difficult to do but could be somewhat time-consuming to implement using KVM and/or others like VMware and VBox. If you’re not already using a widely cross-platform virtual disk format, you may need to convert the format(is why I tend to use RAW format although might be missing some features other formats provide). Again, if you have access to multiple machines even temporarily for testing, it’s a big time saver.

It may also be a clue if you’re seeing the problem immediately on a freshly booted machine or if the machine is under different types of loads (as I suggested could be machine or network).

HTH,
TSU