Re: [gentoo-user] Why did Synaptics touchpad stop working?

[Jack <ostroffjh@users.sourceforge.net>]

On 9/8/24 10:20 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> This morning when I booted my Thinkpad T580, the Synaptics touchpad
> buttons didn't work at all, and the "pointer" function just barely
> worked: the response was slow and jerky with a noticeable delay.
>
> In order to get it working again, I had to enable some rmi4 stuff in
> my kernel config:
>
>      < # CONFIG_RMI4_CORE is not set
>      ---
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_CORE=y
>      > # CONFIG_RMI4_I2C is not set
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_SMB=m
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_F03=y
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_F03_SERIO=y
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_2D_SENSOR=y
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_F11=y
>      > CONFIG_RMI4_F12=y
>      > # CONFIG_RMI4_F30 is not set
>      > # CONFIG_RMI4_F34 is not set
>      > # CONFIG_RMI4_F3A is not set
>      > # CONFIG_RMI4_F55 is not set
>
> Apparently, it used to work as a PS/2 mouse, but then it "just quit",
> and I hand to enable rmi4 SMBus support.  The Gentoo Wiki page didn't
> mention the rmi4 options and instead said to enable some I2C HID stuff
> that didn't seem to be relevent for my hardware.
>
> There was a dmsg message that pointed me towards the rmi4 options.
>
> What's really bugging me is why did it quit working?
>
> Nothing relevent seems to have been updated recently:
>
>      1725658908:  >>> emerge (1 of 6) dev-libs/libffi-3.4.6 to /
>      1725658926:  >>> emerge (2 of 6) dev-libs/gobject-introspection-1.78.1-r1 to /
>      1725658987:  >>> emerge (3 of 6) media-libs/graphene-1.10.8-r1 to /
>      1725659006:  >>> emerge (4 of 6) gui-libs/gtk-4.12.5-r2 to /
>      1725659219:  >>> emerge (5 of 6) app-crypt/gcr-4.2.1 to /
>      1725659258:  >>> emerge (6 of 6) app-crypt/pinentry-1.3.0-r3 to /
>
>      1725762247:  >>> emerge (1 of 7) sys-firmware/intel-microcode-20240813_p20240815 to /
>      1725762261:  >>> emerge (2 of 7) dev-python/jaraco-context-6.0.1 to /
>      1725762273:  >>> emerge (3 of 7) dev-python/setuptools-73.0.1 to /
>      1725762292:  >>> emerge (4 of 7) dev-python/idna-3.8 to /
>      1725762305:  >>> emerge (5 of 7) dev-python/truststore-0.9.2 to /
>      1725762317:  >>> emerge (6 of 7) gui-libs/gtk-4.14.4-r1 to /
>      1725762557:  >>> emerge (7 of 7) www-client/google-chrome-128.0.6613.119 to /
>
> I did boot into Windows yesterday at one point, but I do that fairly
> regularly (a few times a month) and it has never caused any problems
> in the past.
>
> As I said, I've got it working again, but I'm baffled what caused it
> to stop working.
>
> --
> Grant
Any chance some internal connection has come loose?  How old is the 
laptop?  I'd probably suspect hardware before software, but I wouldn't 
put money on anything.