# Very weird problem with a Synaptics touch pad on a Compaq nx6310 (pad goes to "sleep"?)



## GrandAdmiralThrawn (May 29, 2015)

So, I have this older HP nx6310 notebook, and I had my Synaptics tochpad run as a regular 3-button mouse with sysmouse, which seems to be the default. This is quite terrible, because the hypersensitive tap-to-click feature will mess everything up when using the pad.

Oh, and I'm using FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE, and this is a x86 32-bit machine.

To fix that tapping issue, I changed /boot/loader.conf by adding the following at the end:


```
hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"
```

Now /boot/loader.conf looks like this on my box:


```
vboxdrv_load="YES"
i915kms_load="YES"
fuse_load="YES"
coretemp_load="YES"
kern.vty=vt
hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"
```

That makes the tap-to-click feature much more bearable, and I can even disable it completely if I want, using some of the sysctls/tunables that become available with Synaptics support turned on. The X11 driver is just "mouse" in that case, using /dev/sysmouse as a device and with moused running in the background. So here's the relevant part of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, pretty unspectacular:


```
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "Mouse0"
        Driver     "mouse"
        Option     "Protocol" "auto"
        Option     "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
        Option     "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection
```

In case it matters, here is my /etc/rc.conf too:


```
hostname="bsdbox"
keymap="de"
ifconfig_bfe0="DHCP"
sshd_enable="YES"
ntpd_enable="YES"
powerd_enable="YES"
moused_enable="YES"
dumpdev="AUTO"
hald_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP"
linux_enable="YES"
vboxnet_enable="YES"
acpi_hp_enable="YES"
devfs_system_ruleset="system"
```

Now, here's what's weird:

Whenever I leave the pad idle for like 10-30 seconds or so, it appears to not work anymore when putting the finger on it again. So you move your finger around on the pad for a few seconds, and that makes it just come back to life, as if it would need to wake up first or something. It takes maybe 2-3 seconds for the touchpad to "revive" after making contact again. This never happened before turning on the Synaptics support tunable in /boot/loader.conf.

Also, it does not seem to affect /dev/ums0 at all. When I hook up one of my USB mice, those always work. One part is funny though, and quite interesting!

When I move the USB mouse just a tiny little bit, the touchpad also comes to life immediately! So say I leave the pad alone, and touch it after some time, it needs a few seconds to recover.

If I do the same thing, but just briefly move the USB mouse first, then touch the pad, there is no lag at all. It comes to life immediately after the USB mouse has sent some data to the system.

And (maybe this has some relevance) the time it takes for the pad to fall asleep does not seem to be identical for all such events. Sometimes it stays alive for 30 seconds without touching, sometimes 10.

Any ideas as to what might be going wrong here? Or an idea about how I should attempt to debug this?

Thanks!


----------

