[PLEASE TEST] Better support for Synaptics Touchpads

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Doug Poland wrote:

> > Which appears to tell the psm driver to ignore all that and be boring
> > with respect to synaptics features (i.e., work).
> > 
> Would this have anything to do with the mouse on a Dell laptop moving
> all by itself?  When I boot with ACPI enabled on 5.2.1-R or 5.3Beta the
> mouse will simply go wild, moving all over the screen at will.  This
> happens at the console and in X (both XFree86 and XOrg).  

No, that's probably a problem with your Dell notebook.  I've had two Dells
do it, and they do it under Windows as well.  I was sure it was a FreeBSD
psm bug for months and months, and spent days hacking on psm trying to
figure out what was triggering it.  Then one day I was sitting in a
meeting at our offices in Santa Clara, and a whole room of people were
typing on Dells, and about once a minute someone would go "Damn mouse".
Then it clicked :-).  I wouldn't rule out a recent FreeBSD change doing
it, but given my experiences I'd think it more likely to be a hardware
issue.  it went away each time I replaced the motherboard, but came back a
few months later, suggesting wear-and-tear.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research