Re: [gentoo-user] Trackpad nightmare: Elantech ETPS/2

[Michael]

On Tuesday, 5 May 2020 15:28:15 BST inasprecali wrote:
> On Tue, 5 May 2020 14:58:32 +0100
>
> Victor Ivanov <vic.m.ivanov@×××××.com> wrote:
> > My laptop's trackpad is an ETPS/2 Elantech on a ThinkPad Yoga
> > 260 (ca. 2016). Every so often it freezes and refuses to respond
> > to any and all input. The freeze usually lasts for a second or
> > so, but can sometimes be longer in the range of 10-15 seconds or
> > even freeze indefinitely until the "psmouse" kernel module is
> > reloaded. It also experiences "jumping" behaviour, most commonly
> > encountered when press-holding one of the companion buttons
> > along with a dragging gesture, but that's not an exclusive
> > scenario.
>
> I experience very similar symptoms on my ThinkPad 13. It doesn't
> happen often, but it does sometimes happen.
>
> > A quick Google search can reveal complaints about this issues
> > across distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian) that can be traced
> > back to at least 2012 in various laptop models. There also
> > appears to be a related upstream kernel bug [1] that has been
> > left in limbo.
>
> I noticed this as well, it's almost certainly a bug in Linux
> itself which, for some reason, has never been fixed after all
> these years.  I don't think Gentoo can do much about it.
>
> Unfortunately I'm not aware of any real solution, but as a
> workaround, you can unmount and re-mount the psmouse module when
> the problem occurs (if psmouse is not built compiled as a module,
> I suggest you do it).  At least this is what works for me, YMMV:
>
> # modprobe -r psmouse
> # modprobe psmouse

I'm on an old Lenovo which must have different hardware/firmware.  It does not 
suffer from such trackpad problems.  Just an idea: have you migrated your 
system to libinput driver and removed all old synaptics syntax in /etc/X11/
xorg.conf.d/ to avoid potential clashes?