Repeated or missed keys after upgrading from 6.2 to 7.0

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 27 May 2008 01:17:48 am Mike Silbersack wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 24 Dec 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.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Mike "Silby" Silbersack
> 
> For anyone still interested (and I suspect those who have Acer laptops 
> will be), I've finally found a fix for this problem.
> 
> The same problem was reported with some versions of Linux:
> 
> http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9998
> 
> To summarize the bug report, the problem is that the ACPI Embedded 
> Controller on some Acer laptops handles both keyboard I/O and the 
> communication channel to the smart battery.  If you talk to the battery 
> too quickly, the chip will start dropping keystrokes.  To deal with this, 
> the Linux acpi maintainers added back some delays that had been present in 
> the past.
> 
> I tried a similar approach, and found it to be effective on FreeBSD 7.0. 
> Applying the attached patch and setting debug.acpi.ec.extradelay=1000 
> seems to completely cure the keyboard problems for me.
> 
> Anyone interested in reviewing the patch?

I think it looks ok, but I would run it by njl@ to be sure.

-- 
John Baldwin