Touchpad not working and locking CPU

[Zibri Soft]

Notebook: ASUS GL703VD
Touchpad: probably ELAN clickpad

it seems to be connected to i2c bus

the modules loaded are elan_i2c and multitouch_hid

the multitouch hid module take almost 100% of cpu and the mouse cursor moves badly (loosing it for a second or 2 then resuming) also feature clicks and doubleclicks and sensitivity problems.

doing rmmod hid-multitouch.ko (or rmmod multitouch_hid) and blacklisting the module solves the cpu problem but obviously the touchoad is dead.

SEVERITY VERY HIGH
It probably affects many other ASUS models.

(the touchpad works perfectly in windows 10 by the way)

[Ubuntu Kernel Bot (ubuntu-kernel-bot)]

This bug is missing log files that will aid in diagnosing the problem. While running an Ubuntu kernel (not a mainline or third-party kernel) please enter the following command in a terminal window:

apport-collect 1738263

and then change the status of the bug to 'Confirmed'.

If, due to the nature of the issue you have encountered, you are unable to run this command, please add a comment stating that fact and change the bug status to 'Confirmed'.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.

[Zibri Soft (zibri-)]

there is no need for logs because I checked them all and there is no clue about the cause.
ANYWAYS, a guy with the same problem on a simlar notebook solved by patching 2 kernel modules.

Please read this:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9710953/

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Looks like the guy is me.

ELAN folks already pointed out that the patch is not correct.

Subsequent discussion suggested that a touchpad firmware update can solve the issue. Although the firmware is not from ASUS official.

[Zibri Soft (zibri-)]

By the way the ID of this trackpad is: ELAN1200 04F3:3090

Is there any solution? Even a work-around would be good.

One thing: the trackpad works inside uefi bios.. is not possible to use it talking to the bios instead of i2c directly?

[Luke Williams (wililupy)]

Hello,

I actually installed the patch on my laptop with the latest Artful kernel and I did not see any difference in the performance of the touchpad on the laptop. It could be that it is because the patch is for a different version of the laptop (G752VS) which while similar, it does have a different PCI address for the touchpad, which I think is why it didn't work.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to come up with the settings that would work with our Touchpad, so I currently have it disabled in Gnome and use a regular mouse for moving and it works for now. Kind of a pain that I have to use that as a work around but its either that, or deal with a touchpad that performs so bad that I would rather work in the terminal all day and not get anything done.

I noticed that by moving to the 4.13 kernel, even in Xenial, a lot of devices work better, and installing the proprietary NVidia drivers fixes a lockup issue and the F1-F7 buttons now work so I can break into a TTY session where using the nouveau drivers just led to CPU hangs (never the same CPU either, even though CPU2 was very common and happened more than the others, I saw 1 and 3 also hang but I also noticed with 4.13 kernel compared to the 4.4 kernel that they included skylake extensions which fixed a lot of issues I was running into for performance and just the system randomly hanging. I also couldn't install Ubuntu without passing the nouveau.modeset=0 kernel parameter in the grub menu since it would kernel panic during boot saying CPU's were frozen and the nouveau driver was failing to start properly.
The laptop would install clean and you run on the nouveau drivers once installed and running, but if you tried any of the F1-F7 keys nothing would happen and when you tried to reboot or shutdown, it would just hang and never power off the laptop. Also audio wouldn't work. Ubuntu would detect it and said that there is a sound card installed, but if you tried to play music, nothing, volume control would say it was going up and down, but no audio. Once I installed the NVidia Proprietary drivers the system started working as normal, with exception of the touchpad.
It is a version 4 touchpad. I read about it features from kernel.org [1] and that helped me deduce what version, and according to kernel.org it is supported and should work OOB. What weird that I noticed is that before I login to Gnome desktop, the mouse seems to perform much better, and the scrolling feature works like a champ, it is just the regular mouse movement and touch to click which feels like it is almost over sensitive to that. I will move the mouse from the center of the screen to the sidebar to Firefox, which requires about 6 full, edge to edge trackpad drags, and in those drags, it will try to select and hightlight whatever is on my desktop at that time, and only move about 1 inch at a time, not at all, or fly way past what I'm trying to get to and I have to retry.
As Zibri mentioned, the mouse functions properly in Windows 10 and even in the BIOS. I haven't tried it on any other Distro's yet. That is my next step to maybe see if the xinput driver needs to use some other driver like mtrack or something more generic. I...

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

@Luke,

I think it's better to file separate bugs for each non-working device, so we can tackle it one by one.

[Luke Williams (wililupy)]

So, I read in a thread that someone was having something similar happen to them and they built the 4.14 kernel and this fixed the issue. I decided to pull and build the Bionic kernel from git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-bionic and install that on my Artful laptop and now everything appears to be working normal. The touchpad is fully responsive and working as it should.
I will continue to test throughout the weekend, but it looks like the current 4.15.0-10-generic kernel does fix the elan touchpad issue on the GL702VD.

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Thanks for your testing. So at least this is fixed in upstream kernel.

[Luke Williams (wililupy)]

So I updated to Disco with the touchpad on the Asus GL702VD and for the most part, it works, I can right click and left click and use 2 fingers to scroll, however, while I tail the /var/log/syslog I get a bunch of the following errors that repeat, where with the 4.18 kernel these are suppressed:

May 3 05:16:56 ubuntu /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[1719]: (EE) event5 - ELAN1200:00 04F3:3090 Touchpad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.
May 3 05:16:56 ubuntu /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[1719]: See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.12.6/touchpad-jumping-cursors.html for details

However, I still have the same issue where if I touch the touchpad with all 5 fingers, it locks up the touchpad and I have to use a USB mouse to use the cursor. I also get the following error from the syslog:

May 3 05:16:58 ubuntu kernel: [ 424.991449] i2c_designware i2c_designware.0: i2c_dw_handle_tx_abort: lost arbitration

The only way to get it to work is to reboot the system.

Also, the only way I could get Disco to work was in Graphic safe mode otherwise the system boots, and then locks up shortly after starting the desktop. I tried to boot up using modeset.nouveau=0 but it still locks up requiring a hard reset. However, in graphics safe mode, the system is useable. Once I install Ubuntu and use the proprietary nVidia graphics, I can then use the Fx buttons again and most of the shortcut Fn buttons work (calculator, fan control, brightness, contrast still do not work from press Fn+F5-F8 and I cannot put it in airplane mode (fn+F12) but sleep mode does work (Fn+F11)

I can provide more details/logs if you let me know what you need.

Thanks

[Luke Williams (wililupy)]

I did figure out a way to start the touchpad to work again after I lock it up using 5 fingers to lock it up:

sudo modprobe -r hid-multitouch && sudo modprobe hid-multitouch

This will bring the touchpad back online so you can use it. I created a script with this in it, and then added it as a keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu so that it was executed if my palm accidentally locks my touchpad, this will enable it again without having to reboot. However, this is a bandaid and it should really work out of the box.

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Luke, please test this kernel:
https://people.canonical.com/~khfeng/lp1738263/

[Luke Williams (wililupy)]

So the latest Disco Kernel (Bionic HWE 5.0.0-31-generic) seems to have fixed all the issues with the touchpad. I can now touch the touchpad with all 5 fingers and it doesn't lock up and require me to restart the multitouch-hid module.
It also seems that this version of the kernel also fixed the keyboard issues where the brightness Fn keys work as well as the keyboard brightness, airplane mode and sleep mode.