Ive been using Fedora 3/4 for a while now mainly because it supported full touchpad functionality out of the box.

Unfortuneately after upgradeing to any kernel 2.6.13 or newer on ANY distro my touchpad gets screwed up.

Everything boots fine w/o errors as expected, except whenever touchpad is attempted to be used dmesg outputs:

psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 1
or byte 4, etc over and over. Sometimes it says:
psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 - driver resynched
Once I saw it said something like going into "relaxed mode" due to the errors.

This happens on any distro using a kernel 2.6.13 or newer.

Researching/google seemed to suggest that the touchpad interrupt was failing because a lower interrrupt was blocking for too long. Usually associated with battery polling or cpu frequency polling.

I tried booting w/ all these options(or combinations):

noapic noapci nolapic noapictimer
apm=off acpi=off lapic=off apictimer=off
irqpoll pci=assign-busses i8042.nomux

Nothing worked at all:
The only thing that did was booting with:
psmouse.proto=bare
or
psmouse.proto=imps (Sometimes worked)
Which force my touchpad into strict ps2 mode, synaptics driver not loaded, hence lose scrolling, etc....

But in this mode touchpad works fine, in Windows OK too.

My Bios has almost no setting to fool with, tried switching Dos touchpad support, usb2/1 dos support etc, sppedstep setting but there isnt anything else, none worked.

The problem appears as soon as mouse pointer appears during boot up, USB mouse(plugged in already/ or hotplugged at any time) works fine. Im pretty sure its nothing to do with X (xorg.conf) or gnome as a completely bare install with gnome only works fine, then all I do is upgrade kernel and hosed.......


Its is apparent by now though that it was definitely something that was changed (IN KERNEL) between 2.6.12 and 2.6.13 and any newer ones up to 2.6.16 now. Ive tried several distro specific boards w/ no luck. So I come here as a last resort. I really need help. If I can figure out what was changed in the kernel Ill unchange it and rebuild, but i GOTAA FIND WHATS WRONG FIRST....

Any help appreciated, thx

If you go to freshmeat.net and search for synaptics and download the package, there are notes about 2.6 kernels needing to be patched to support the touchpad. It's a pretty nice package with troubleshooting notes, and a couple of guys on Slackware have gotten their touchpads to work using it. Check the Slackware forum, I think CW Wilson is one guy who runs it using a 2.6 kernel.

I run a 2.4.. kernel and the driver worked out of the box.

Thanks for the reply,

All kernels from 2.6.6 through 2.6.12 in fedora 3 and fedora 4 worked fine oob.
So I dont think its a 2.6 vs 2.4 problem but a .12 vs .13-->.16 one....

Ill check it out, not sure its going to work though

If not, contact the dev. It seems like those guys are pretty responsive from the threads I saw. They will probably be able to figure it out.

Now if I could only get it working on OpenBSD!