MacBook Pro touchpad randomly stops working, needs module reload

[Daniel Graziotin]

I've got a Macbook Pro 6,2 that runs Ubuntu 11.04.
It randomly happens - let's say every hour - that the touchpad stops working. The pointer freezes but cliking and double clicking is still possible.

The ugly workaround is to open a terminal, remove the module and load it again:
sudo modprobe -r bcm5974
sudo modprobe bcm5974

This did not happen with 10.10
I will now attach dmesg output. If you need some logs, just tell me.

[Frédéric Grosshans (fgrosshans)]

Possible duplicate of #776289 .

[Daniel Graziotin (dgraziotin)]

Bug #776289 describes the same behavior, but I am using bcm5974 module, not appletouch. The reported dmesg output reports a load of appletouch just because I was trying to see if I was using a wrong module, but it's related to bcm5974. The bug also happens when using Ubuntu Classic (No Unity)

[indium (indium)]

I'm having a similar problem, but for me it happens mostly in a certain sequence: I switch off the touchpad because an external mouse is attached (via xinput). Switching back on works. Then I put my macbook pro 6,2 to sleep and unplug the mouse. When I resume working (without the external mouse) the internal mouse is sometimes locked (which I can unlock via xinput), but sometimes nothing works (not xinput, not synclient).

Then, your modprobe trick works.

That is the last resort, and xinput, gpointing-device-settings and synclient don't help.

Xinput and synclient see the same properties and the same settings. I can change these properties, but the mouse doesn't respond to my finger moving over the pad.

gpointing-device-settings changes these properties as well, but doesn't read the values 'real-time' when I change them via xinput or synclient.

TAPPING and CLICKING and TWO-FINGER scrolling DO WORK (i.e. xev reports these).

[Brian Teague (bteague)]

This looks like a duplicate of bug #817979.