Mouse begins to drift left under heavy wifi load (shared IRQ problem?)

[Rolf Leggewie]

Alright. This is one of the stranger bugs I've seen and it already happened while I was still on hardy. I don't even have an idea of what package the problem could be in or if it is a hardware issue after all. Please comment here if you have a similar problem.

Most of the time I have a wired internet connection, but recently I'm using WLAN a lot and I stumbled on the following. I have a Zonet ZCF1100 802.11b wifi card in the compact flash slot of my Thinkpad X24. The connection is wpa-protected. When WLAN is under heavy load (100KB/sec and more), the mouse starts to drift to the left. Once the load drops, the drifting seems to stop.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I wonder if bug 334957 and bug 334549 share some commonality?

It was suggested in #ubuntu-bugs to look into shared interrupts.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

The mouse is a USB mouse and indeed shares IRQ 11 with the WLAN card/CF slot.

$ cat /proc/interrupts
           CPU0
  0: 34567058 XT-PIC-XT timer
  1: 67903 XT-PIC-XT i8042
  2: 0 XT-PIC-XT cascade
  3: 4561463 XT-PIC-XT pcmcia1.0
  4: 10 XT-PIC-XT
  5: 2 XT-PIC-XT
  7: 0 XT-PIC-XT parport0
  9: 145199 XT-PIC-XT acpi
 10: 2 XT-PIC-XT
 11: 1897568 XT-PIC-XT uhci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb3, yenta, yenta, Intel 82801CA-ICH3, eth3
 12: 48381 XT-PIC-XT i8042
 14: 790664 XT-PIC-XT ata_piix
 15: 0 XT-PIC-XT ata_piix
NMI: 0 Non-maskable interrupts
LOC: 0 Local timer interrupts
SPU: 0 Spurious interrupts
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

$ lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 046d:c01b Logitech, Inc. MX310 Optical Mouse
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I was told that the number of interrupts for IRQ 11 is fairly high. I also encounter another highly annoying problem that I suppose could be related to interrupts. When I use SIP VoIP (internet telephony) with ekiga or twinkle, anything the other end says is played back to them. IOW, the hear their own voice with a short delay.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I am on Jaunty, fully up-to-date. And the problem persists.

$ uname -a
Linux X24 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

BIOS for my Thinkpad X24 is up-to-date

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=32a11385-206e-4964-bb64-8d302a49f2af
Lsusb:
 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
 Bus 001 Device 003: ID 046d:c01b Logitech, Inc. MX310 Optical Mouse
 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
MachineType: IBM 2662MQG
NonfreeKernelModules: slamr
Package: linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic 2.6.28-11.42
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdLine: root=LABEL=ROOT resume=LABEL=SWAP1 ro noapic splash quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
 LANG=de_DE.utf8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.28-11.42-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout fax floppy fuse lpadmin plugdev scanner src vboxusers video

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

unchanged in karmic

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I retried with yesterday's mainline kernel (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/MainlineBuilds) and the problem is still the same.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I think this has improved noticeably over the last two or three weeks (I don't connect to Wifi every day). I'd say it's almost gone.

[Eric Miao (eric.y.miao)]

Rolf,

Thanks for testing this. Could you let know which kernel version significantly improve this issue?

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Hi Rolf,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid.

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 334957

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Brad Figg (brad-figg)]

This bug was filed against a series that is no longer supported and so is being marked as Won't Fix. If this issue still exists in a supported series, please file a new bug.

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