[vox-tech] Lazy Mouse

[Rod Roark]

On Thursday 24 June 2004 01:18 pm, John Wojnaroski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Running Debian "woody" and Linux-2.4.18 on a P4 with X-11 and a PS2 mouse.
> 
> whenever there is heavy disk activity like compiling the mouse tends to hang
> up and work intermittent until all disk activity ceases.
> 
> Is it a driver problem, X-11 config issue, linux build issue, or some
> swap/buffer settings? It's like the mouse events are ignored or just queued
> until the disc accesses complete. Other than that the mouse works just fine
> in all the console and xterm windows and games.

Assuming you have an IDE hard drive as /dev/hda:

If DMA is not active for the drive, performance will suffer
in various ways.  Try "hdparm -d /dev/hda" to see if DMA is
turned on.  If not, you can try turning it on with
"hdparm -d1 /dev/hda".  But make sure you have a current
backup first, just in case there was a good reason for DMA
not being enabled!  "man hdparm" for more info.

If DMA cannot be activated, then perhaps your kernel was not
compiled with support for the specific chipset in your
motherboard.

If none of the above seems to apply, then there may be an
interrupt conflict between your PS/2 mouse port and some
other device, such as a PCI card.  In that case you could
try moving PCI card(s) to different slots, and checking the
BIOS settings for weirdness with interrupt assignments.

-- Rod