PS/2 Issues

From: Nathanael D. Noblet
Date: Tue Dec 02 2008 - 14:44:50 EST


Hello,
Total noob here, but I'm having issues with ps2 keyboard/mouse suddenly no longer responding. I use fedora and this has happened for the last three versions however f10 seems to be even more often. Let me describe the situation and what I've done to try to find the cause.


Periodically my system 'hangs' in that it no longer accepts input from either mouse or keyboard plugged into the PS2 ports. Any music / video playing continues. All apps continue. I can ssh into the box and top reveals no huge spike in load or anything out of the ordinary. I am using an ATI card with the OSS video drivers, but even if I go to init 3 I don't regain input response. I was told to see if perhaps any of the events threads were blocked or otherwise not running. So via ssh I prompted a sysrq-t to the logs. This produced this output http://hashbin.com/vPF . As you can see the output is garbled. I've done it a few times and the location of the garbled output is different each time. I've run this system under memtest for hours and hours without any issue.

Additional information. If I plug in a usb mouse, it works fine and I can reboot the machine cleanly. The problem is easily triggered by running a bittorrent client with many torrents. At least it tends to lock up soon after that. I've also had lockups sooner when sharing via nfs. Even without those programs running I still have lockups periodically, however those programs being active shorten the time between lockups. If I don't run them sometimes I can last a week, sometimes an hour before needing to reboot. I've talked to people on the #fedora-kernel room, but no-one there either had ideas or responded.

I'm willing to do the work to figure this out, but I have yet to really debug a kernel issue. there is no kernel oops being logged, no errors nothing out of the ordinary, but all of a sudden ps2 input is gone. I'm about to purchase a PS2->usb adapter to run my keyboard and mouse through that to see if they are affected by the issue.

Ideas pointers or methods to provide more information would be appreciated.

--
Nathanael d. Noblet
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/