powernowd causes mouse to become erratic on high I/O load

I am also having mouse problems on Hoary on an Inspiron 8100. During raised load - the mouse pointer appears to be immobile for about 95% of the time in each second. i.e. the
mouse position updates about once per second, and moves a large distance for small mouse movements.

During this time, the sound will also loop, which is also very annoying.

Can the severity of this bug be raised, as I'd say it's a show stopper for many people wanting to use linux as a viable alternative to MS Windows.

No one seems to be looking at this bug. Maybe the status should be assigned..? Please can someone change
the status?

Yes i have the same issue. My laptop is a Dell c610 with 768 mem, 1ghz pM with
speed step enabled. It occurs with the touchpad, and also when the touchpad is
enabled with an external PS2 Mouse. There are no issues with my mouse on other
versions of Linux/windows. Hardware is functioning properly, as checked with:
"linux vga=771 [1] noapic nolapic" command. Number only changes with movement of
the mouse.

This is a real big annoyance. I will search for further solutions. If none are
found, I will then change my Linux Distros. This would not be preferable though.
I have just installed Ubuntu and so far, aside from mouse problem, I am really
enjoying the Distro.

Thanks for any help/advice related to this problem

I found that it was "powernowd" that was causing the problem. Disable that, and
you should be fine.

All powernowd does is to tell the kernel to scale the CPU frequency. If that
causes problems, it could be a hardware issue or a kernel issue, but not powernowd.

Hello all,

If this is related to weird mouse movement, could each of you try temporarily
booting with:

  i8042.nomux=1

on the kernel command line. Not sure whether this will help, but it is the
solution on a machine with vaguely similar problems.

Thanks, Paul

In my case problem occour when cpu scales down.
To reproduce, open glxgears. Cpu climbs up clock. Then close glxgears. When cpu
scales down clock (in seconds) the whole system (so the mouse) will freeze for a
second.

(In reply to comment #7)
> In my case problem occour when cpu scales down.
> To reproduce, open glxgears. Cpu climbs up clock. Then close glxgears. When cpu
> scales down clock (in seconds) the whole system (so the mouse) will freeze for a
> second.

Sorry, forgot to mention: Intel PIII-M on Dell Inspiron 8100

There was a p4 errata dealing with cpu scaling that was fixed in recent
(2.6.12-9.X) kernels. Can you try one of these and let me know if that fixes the
problem? Basically it prevents scaling down below 2Ghz.

(In reply to comment #9)
> There was a p4 errata dealing with cpu scaling that was fixed in recent
> (2.6.12-9.X) kernels. Can you try one of these and let me know if that fixes the
> problem? Basically it prevents scaling down below 2Ghz.

I'm on 2.6.12-9-386 Breezy kernel. On my PIII-M@1GHz problem still occours.

(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > There was a p4 errata dealing with cpu scaling that was fixed in recent
> > (2.6.12-9.X) kernels. Can you try one of these and let me know if that fixes the
> > problem? Basically it prevents scaling down below 2Ghz.
>
> I'm on 2.6.12-9-386 Breezy kernel. On my PIII-M@1GHz problem still occours.

... and I solved my problem hacking cpufreq...sh to load the ICH module in every
case.

This bug has been flagged because it is old and possibly inactive. It may or may
not be fixed in the latest release (Breezy Badger 5.10). It is being marked as
"NEEDSINFO". In two weeks time, if the bug is not updated back to "NEW" and
validated against Breezy, it will be closed.

This is needed in order to help manage the current bug list for the kernel. We
would like to fix all bugs, but need users to test and help with debugging.

If this change was in error for this bug, please respond and make the
appropriate change (or email <email address hidden> if you cannot make the
change).

Thanks for your help.

I hope this bug doesn't get closed. It has been the same on hoary, breezy and
even dapper on a test partition (can't recall warty). All this time I have
refrained from using powernowd, but recently I am working 'mobile' again, so my
batteries fly (using 2 now) without using it. I'm running the same Dell Inspiron
8100 (PIIIM 1GHz) as Fabio, and I've tried his hack to load speedstep_ich at all
times (instead of speedstep-smi), but of no avail. My system errors on
modprobing speedstep-ich:
> FATAL: Error inserting speedstep_ich
(/lib/modules/2.6.12-9-686/kernel/arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/speedstep-ich.ko):
No such device.

I fixed this on my Dell C600 laptop by changing a line in
/usr/share/powernowd/cpufreq-detect.sh from:

if [ -f $IOPORTS ] && grep -q 'Intel ICH' $ IOPORTS ; then

to:

if [ -f $IOPORTS ] && grep -q 'ACPI CPU throttle' $ IOPORTS ; then

is this similar to how Fabio did it?

If possible, please upgrade to Dapper's 2.6.15-7 kernel. If you do not want to
upgrade to Dapper, then you can also wait for the Dapper Flight 2 CD's, which
are due out within the next few days.

Let me know if this bug still exists with this kernel.

Thank you for reporting this bug and following up on it.

I am marking this bug Closed since there has been no response from you for over three months. We
would like to fix all existing issues, but need need feedback to help with debugging.

Should you still have a problem with the latest up to date Dapper kernel and packages, please reopen this bug. In this case, please answer the questions that have already been asked of you before and provide the log files and information required for debugging.

Thanks again, please report any other issues you have after checking that they haven't already been reported.