Comment 17 for bug 96596

I have an Acer 9301 Wmsi which exhibted this exact problem. however I have also found an exact solution to which makes perfect sense to me.

Along with the psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio4/input0 lost sync at byte messages I was also getting

atkbd.c: Spurious NAK on isa0060/serio0. Some program might be trying access hardware directly.

I tried various workarounds including what was suggest above with no success. I tried the nvidia timing paramter and that too had no effect. So then it occured to me that the 2 might be related. So what is it that actually access the keyboard apart from X. And I knew what it was. The ledd functions are designed to program the keyboard for various functions. And there was a kernel parameter that fitted that usage. In another thread somewhere concerning the spurious ack ( http://kerneltrap.org/node/5898 ) someone suggested using i8042.panicblink=0 which no longer is a parameter in my 2.6.23 kernel. however i8042.dumbkbd is. And by enabling that it does try to send anything to the keyboard at all.

so I set i8042.dumbkbd=1 in the kernel parameters and not only did the spurious ACk error disappear but the psmouse lost sync messages too.

So I suggest people attempt that and see if it solves they issue. If so then it ought to be noted that the i8042 driver is buggy on certain motherboards and should not attempt to write anything to the keyboard.

Hope that helps.