Touchpad and keyboard randomly freezing (Elantech)

xghozt

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I have an issue that causes my touchpad and keyboard to freeze completely, randomly. I have searched and tried dozens of possible solutions to no avail. This problem spans across multiple distros. I've tried everything from various Ubuntu flavors to arch, etc.. I have ruled out hardware failure and replaced my RAM just in case. I've tried synaptics and libinput, several different kernels.

I've narrowed it down to being related to having an "elantech" touchpad.

When it freezes, the only thing I can do is plugin a usb keyboard and run this:
Code:
sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

After that, it works fine for a while. Sometimes for 2 minutes, sometimes 5 hours... it's seemingly random.

I've never had it freeze when the machine is idle. I have had it freeze with the lmb "pressed", usually it's when I'm "using" the mouse in some way. Dragging, multi-touch or clicking.

There are THOUSANDS of posts online with different ideas and possible solutions.. not a single one has a fully "working" solution for intel laptops with an elantech touchpad.

Can anyone here help?

Here's some more information that may help debug.

Code:
[34970.992535] psmouse serio1: elantech: assuming hardware version 4 (with firmware version 0x361f03)
[34971.008217] psmouse serio1: elantech: Synaptics capabilities query result 0x41, 0x15, 0x0f.
[34971.023257] psmouse serio1: elantech: Elan sample query result 06, 29, 75
[35622.417867] psmouse serio1: bad data from KBC - timeout bad parity
[35622.427542] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
[35622.440276] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
[35622.453046] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
[35622.465783] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
[35622.478506] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
[35622.478516] psmouse serio1: issuing reconnect request
[39095.137332] psmouse serio1: elantech: assuming hardware version 4 (with firmware version 0x361f03)
[39095.153095] psmouse serio1: elantech: Synaptics capabilities query result 0x41, 0x15, 0x0f.
[39095.168069] psmouse serio1: elantech: Elan sample query result 06, 29, 75

Code:
# xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad                    id=19    [slave  pointer  (2)]

I'm on archlinux at the moment as I was hoping to keep things simple but I haven't had any luck. I had the same problem on every distro I have tried. Including Ubutunu, Linuxmint, Pop_OS and a few more. Here's the current kernel:

Code:
Linux version 5.18.15-arch1-2 (linux@archlinux) (gcc (GCC) 12.1.1 20220730, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.38)

Other things I have tried:
Adding "psmouse.proto=bare" to "/etc/default/grub"
Creating a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf file with various options.
Modifying /etc/mkinitcpio.conf MODULES to load i915 first.
Adding /etc/modprobe.d/elan.conf with "options psmouse elantech_smbus=0 synaptics_intertouch=0"

The laptop I have is a samsung NP900X4C-A03US. Although in my googling this problem appears to not only be samsung laptops.

^ None of this made any difference towards solving the problem.

At this point if it's not something I can resolve then I'd even settle for automatically running the modprobe command when it fails, but I'm not sure how to detect that it failed since there is usually no error in any log files that I can find.
 


Yes it seems these Elantech Touchpads/Trackpoints are quite messy devices. As a Trackpoint user I am mostly happy, as the Touchpad is only used occassionally, for example when I do a lot of scrolling. I have a very recent Thinkpad E14 Gen 4 (AMD). The only issue is that I get some rare "double clicks" which seems like button bounce on the left button click, but which seems to come from a second click that the touchpad registers wrongfully while clicking the physical button. I can not provoke it on purpose, so it's hard to test.

What is also quite annoying, is that I get my kernel log irregularly gets spammed with things like:

psmouse serio1: elantech: discarding packet [00 80 80 36 80 80]
psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6
psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 - driver resynced.

Also when trying to use the touchpad for a while, it sometimes acts glitchy. Sometimes it is slow, sometimes it seems to lose track and reset itself. Luckily I normally don't use it. Still pretty poor for a 2022 laptop to not have such a "basic" device function properly. Also the update politics of Lenovo seem really messed up too.

What I could do so far: Using Windows, apply a Trackpoint Firmware Update from 2020 from an older Thinkpad [1]. I just clicked "next" and it more or less accidentally happened to do the update. Not sure if I really have 1. more recent firmware now, 2. the same, or 3. even older firmware. Anyway, the situation is still the same. I couldn't install a **Touchpad** Firmware Update from 2022. That one says I have newer firmware than the Updater has [2]. Officially it says to be for E14 Gen 3 but not 4 (read the txt file) - I guess they might have the same hardware there, as Gen 3 and 4 are almost the same. I am not even entirely sure if Trackpoint and Touchpad Firmware are really separate from each other. It is all very shady and not properly documented.

However, it seems there are some people - one of them apparently from ELAN Microelectronics - working on some opensource code for firmware updating at least. Maybe something good will come out of that in the longterm, maybe proper distribution of the firmwares, see [3] and [4]. I am thinking of contacting that person, if there is any plan of proper firmware distribution from their side.

[1] https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/...ad-p53-type-20qn-20qq/20qn/downloads/DS505655
[2] https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/...ad-firmware-for-windows-10-thinkpad-e14-gen-2

[3] https://github.com/jinglewu
[4] https://github.com/PaulLiang01043
 
Yes it seems these Elantech Touchpads/Trackpoints are quite messy devices.

Thanks for the reply. I've kind of given up hope. I ended up just using a usb mouse from now on. It's "possible" it's physically broken but I don't see how. The laptop I'm on is from 2011 so it's quite old and there are no new firmware updates for me to try.
 
I think if you anyway use another mouse and by chance have some bootable windows, you can probably just try those firmware updates. They do a certain kind of sanity check and I guess would just install to compatible hardware anyway. There are many on Lenovo's website.
 
Hey, I've been having a similar problem (though with a recent MSI laptop): Across a number of distributions, every once in a while the trackpad simply stops responding (with no record of anything happening in any log file or even dmesg). I eventually noticed this never happened when the laptop was plugged in. As such I have come to the conclusion that it must be a power management issue in my case. Currently I am using MX Linux (with Gnome and Wayland), and the quick patch solution I found was to run any tlp command (e.g. tlp usb, even though my trackpad is not connected through usb). Strangely, even without superuser permission this instantly brings the trackpad back to life.

A more permanent solution has been to set RUNTIME_PM_ON_BAT to on in the tlp config file, but I still don't know how much it'll affect battery life.

Anyway, I don't know if this will apply to you, I have no issues with the keyboard so it may very well be a totally different thing, but with the number of posts I have found discussing similar issues, even if it doesn't help you it might help someone else...

Ah, another strange thing is that when I list the devices with libinput I actually see TWO trackpads: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad and ELAN0305:00 04F3:31FD Touchpad (the one which actually works, according to event monitoring). There's also a ELAN0305:00 04F3:31FD Mouse in the mix. I find it quite odd.
 
One thing that may be of help, which I didn't see mentioned here at Least with ubuntu derivatives is that they went for using synaptics drivers to libinput drivers some time ago on my machine I have to reinstall the syanptics drivers to get my touchpad to work properly. Just a thought you might want to try.
 

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