linux-kernel - Re: Keys get stuck

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Message-Id: <1205407693.6686.16.camel@marge.simson.net>
Date:	Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:28:13 +0100
From:	Mike Galbraith <efault@....de>
To:	Jan Knutar <jk-lkml@....fi>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Hans-Peter Jansen <hpj@...la.net>,
	Jiri Kosina <jkosina@...e.cz>,
	David Newall <davidn@...idnewall.com>,
	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, "Fred ." <eldmannen@...il.com>
Subject: Re: Keys get stuck


On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 11:48 +0200, Jan Knutar wrote:
> 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.

Hm, dunno what all is in that kernel.  Huge swapout with yum upgrade
shouldn't be happening I don't think, upgrades here certainly don't (I'm
using suses upgrade dohickey though...).  I can only recommend trying
latest/greatest stock kernel.

> 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.

Yes, that's the symptom I was refering to.  If you see that under
reasonable CPU load, and _without_ major swapping going on, then I'd be
suspicious of scheduler trouble.  Swap can definitely keep X off the cpu
for extended periods, and that seems to be what triggers the repeated
keys behavior.  (I've never troubleshot it, so must say _seems_)

	-Mike

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