Re: Repeated or missed keys after upgrading from 6.2 to 7.0

On Monday 24 December 2007, Mike Silbersack wrote:
> In order to eat my own dog food, I upgraded my laptop from 6.2 to 7.0.
> This seemed to have gone well, until I started writing a long e-mail while
> sitting on the couch today.  As I was typing the e-mail, I noticed that my
> typing skills seemed to have gone missing; there were words missing 2-3
> letters, and other places where I was apparently holding down keyyyys.
> Heh, that's a real example of the phenomenon right there.
>
> After a while I realized that I was not typing sloppily, but that in fact
> keys are being lost in certain cases and duplicated in others.  Since I
> did not rebuild any ports or packages, I'm convinced that this is directly
> related to the 7.0 upgrade.
>
> This behavior has shown up when running a local copy of pine (inside
> konsole), chatting in ksirc, and in a few other programs.  (I'm running
> KDE.)  I think it happens more when on battery than when plugged into an
> outlet.  I'm running xbattbar, so it could be querying the battery status
> and causing problems.  This is using the laptop's built-in keyboard
> (non-USB.)
>
> I'm going to try to track this down, although I don't know how successful
> I'll be.  I'd like to know if anyone else has seen this problem and if
> they have any additional information that might help me track it down
> faster.

Hi,

It might be related to ACPI polling the battery status, hence from what I 
understand it uses the same interface like the AT keyboard. Try disabling the 
battery monitoring application in KDE. I have a similar problem on my laptop, 
but I use an USB keyboard mostly, so it doesn't matter so much. Last time I 
looked at it I was not able to completely lock down the problem, except that 
there might be a conflict between ACPI and atkbd0 accessing the same piece of 
hardware at the same time. I know that the atkbd is sometimes called without 
Giant locked which makes the situation even more dangerous.

--HPS