Karl Hegbloom emailed me to say that "keyboard
keys sticking, touchpad pointer jumping suddenly across the screen,
lockups under heavy network I/O [was] caused by
polling the battery state via ACPI and the proc file system." This
problem caused, in part, by a delay between the initial request for
information about the battery's status and the response. In that delay
interrupts may be locked out and synchronization with the keyboard and
touch pad may be lost. "The overnight solution is to either turn off
the battery applet, or reduce its polling frequency." Karl also
notes that a BIOS update was also able to solve the problem. Thanks Karl!
I did not find this to be a problem for me in the 2.4.x kernels,
however, it was a problem when I upgraded to 2.6.5. I use
wmacpi to monitor my battery status. By
setting the polling frequency to 1 (the lowest possible number), I seem
to have eliminated the touchpad lockups. In my
.xinitrc file I use:
/usr/bin/wmacpi -s 1
The -s 1 represents the polling frequency
(sample rate) of "once per minute." The default is 20.
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