SUMMARY *** I work on a Surface Pro 3. When I work with Plasma, after a while I suddenly always loose control over the touchpad and even mouse cursor click. There is always a strange phenomenon that precedes this crash. That can be a configuration bar coming unexpectedly from the top of my screen, the window sticking to my pointer or even other things. Directly after that I can't use the touchpad no more. That is to say: I can move the pointer but no more than that. No clicking, dragging etc. Because I'm no more than an enthusiastic user I had to guess the "product" for this bug. Strange thing is that this never occurs on Ubuntu - the second system on this machine. So I guess it is Plasma-related. It is not that I WANT to make this Surface Pro 3 work with Plasma because I cope with Ubuntu. But I hope to help make plasma more robust perhaps also in other hardware configurations. If there is something I can do to help (send some logfile or so) I would be happy to do so. I will submit this bug, I'm writing it with Ubuntu. After that I will startup Plasma and attache my hardware-configuration. *** STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Startup plasma Wayland on the MS Surface Pro 3 (can be Neon, Kubuntu of Tumbleweed) 2. Work with it for a wile 3. OBSERVED RESULT Sometimes very soon or sometimes after a few minutes the touchpad looses functionality EXPECTED RESULT I can keep on working.
Operating System: KDE neon 5.24 KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.91.0 Qt Version: 5.15.3 Kernel Version: 5.13.0-30-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz Memory: 3.7 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa DRI Intel® HD Graphics 4400
Created attachment 147264 [details] this bar I mean, at the top of the screen I just went back to Plasma. I let it upgrade very gently. Without touching anything. As you see in the attached image to process is ongoing. Suddenly this bar drop from the top and I totally loose control over the system.
B.t.w. I find exactly the same result with Fedora KDE spin 35, Opensuse Tumbleweed and Neon User Edition.
That bar appears when you click-and-hold (pr press-and-hold) o the desktop. I would guess that's a symptom of the issue, rather than the cause. Moving to kwin | libinput since this is on Wayland.
I totally agree with your Vision on the cause and effect. It could very well be that Ubuntu suffers from the same, but that they wrote a systemd service to te start libinput when it behaves abnormally. I Searched for such a service in my Ubuntu system but I couldn't find it. Something like that could never harm and could also be a good temporary Solution. I also made this suggesties here https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface/issues/400 .
Discovery: I was trying to get X working. On this MS Surface Pro 3 I never had a cursor using X. Exept when I was installing linux. E.g. Calamares uses the X environment but is had a cursor! So I just gambled and installed the package xserver-xorg-input-multitouch. This gave me a totally working cursor in X. With xserver-xorg-input-multitouch installed I went back to Wayland. The laptop just works better with Wayland only the touchpad used to be so unstable BUT now the touchpad isn't unstable anymore! Suddenly I can work as long as I want and the touchpad remains working! Only one time I had a tiny strange thing, that used to have led me to a touchpad crash and this time it didn't. Plasma is with this package installed totally back on the level of gnome/ubuntu or even better. So the remedy of this problem is installing the package xserver-xorg-input-multitouch on kde... Just to let you know. Thank you.
I spoke too soon. The Surface Pro 3 still suffers from libinput crashes. Only they really happen later (hours, not minutes)
One Sphh suggested here https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface/issues/400 that I could try to install the surface kernel. I did. Successfully (!). I will test it. I'll tell what the result was on this place.
The surface kernel makes my (surface) laptop boot and close down faster imo and I think it remains cooler too. But the libinput crashes remain using Plasma
Just after starting Plasma I did lsmod. And after the touchpad-crash I did it again. There was only one changed.... "i915 2568192 31" had become "i915 2568192 32". I have no clue what this could mean. But I leave it here...
All my troubles seem to have gone... Of all the possible solutions I tried the last one actually worked! I found it here https://askubuntu.com/questions/965856/kworker-blocked-for-more-than-120-seconds-ubuntu-17-10/1363359#1363359 "The solution was for me to switch the whole KWin compositing from OpenGL / GLX to OpenGL ES / EGL. For this, the corresponding config file must be edited." I really not have so much a clue what that means but it works 100%! The result is impressive.
Too bad... still a crash! But things seem better...
*** Bug 453161 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A clear cause of this touchpad crash is when I touch the touch-sensitive part of the screen in the neighborhood of "home-button". Then the touchpad crashes immediately. This can be cured by putting a script-file in the folder /etc/profile.d/ with in it "export KWIN_COMPOSE=O2ES". This works great for the home-button thing and apart from that makes the touchpad crash less often. But still it keeps crashing.
Just to say that I solved this bug... At least on my Surface laptop on my linux-distribution that uses systemd. How? By reading/trial and error/pure luck I came more and more convinced that this cursor-instability wasn't caused by libinput but by kwin! Long story short: I added the lines Restart=always RestarSec=0,1 to the file /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kwin_wayland.service and that really seems to do the trick! This seems to me sort of a workaround, if not to say a "dirty hack". But it works, only of course provided that your distribution uses systemd. Now I am very happy with my KDE Surface-laptop, a little proud on myself en very grateful to you, who took the time to read this bug.
Still plasma crashes... I give up with kde on this machine...
Created attachment 148598 [details] output of "journaldctl -b -1"
Created attachment 148599 [details] part where the word "crash" appears a lot. To view quickly Also I see here in this part: The Wayland connection broke. Did the Wayland compositor die? Four times...
Created attachment 148600 [details] line 3075-3150 of "journaldctl -b -1" in text Here is the text-version of perhaps the relevant part of journaldctl -b -1
This time I really think I found it. I was reading the systemd log-file and came under the impression that Baloo had something to do with it. I read in the file that Baloo crashes, then it drags the whole qt-system with it in its fall, then the system tries to get qt running again but doesn't succeed in that. So I turned off baloo and to my great surprise the system was stable. Then I did a quick search on the web and found this https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/bayy70/fix_for_file_search_and_baloo_crashing/ So I went in the folder ~/.local/share/baloo and found exactly the same file of 3,5 mb, I deleted it and the other file in the folder too. The I rebooted, activated baloo again and since then plasma on the Surface Pro 3 runs like a charm! Strange thing is that I never had this issue with any other machine but obviously had the problem on this machine with Neon kde, Fedora kde, Opensuse tumbleweed kde and with Kubuntu. As far as I know this bug is solved.
Again I spoke too soon... After a reboot (baloo-system off) plasma crashed.
I installed Windows 10 on the Surface and looked if there were updates. And indeed there were: even four firmware-upgrades (one 2016 and three 2019). I was under the impression that I already did this but it turned out I was wrong. After this action I put Kubuntu back and the problem is solved for 97%! When the cursor starts doing strange, and that happens no more than one time per session but very often not at all, I can bring the cursor to life again by moving with my finger over the touch-screen. The result is very workable. I have good hope for plasma 5.25. I will come back here when I have tried that.
Installing the firmware didn't do the trick. Naturally I blamed the "exotic hardware" of this MS Surface pro 3 and even myself but only yesterday I did a search on the internet to look if there were more types of touch screen laptop with complains like mine from people using Plasma. And there were. A lot. This doesn't seem to be one of the stronger sides of Plasma. But I found a way to get tap-to-click to life again when it stopped. Just touching the screen with a finger. Or tap on it. Then tap-to-click comes to life again. That can be within a second but it can also happen after five seconds trying or so. I found forum issues from years ago about this. It would be great if this was repaired.
I found out that it really helps almost 100% when I blacklist the kernel modules - hid_sensor_hub and - hid Then it becomes much quieter. The double-click-and-hold-on-the-desktop" quick settings bar doesn't appear randomly no more and tap-to-click stays working. And strangely enough there are no drawbacks. Only after suspension it often doesn't work no more. Then I have to wake it by tapping the screen with my finger on various places. That works most of the time. I hope this helps more people with "2 in 1" convertible laptops.
This turns out to be caused by the Intel Panel Self Refresh (PSR). PSR seems to be causing all sorts of problems on all kinds of systems. I disabled it and now Plasma behaves 100% as it should. At last I had luck! In the file /etc/default/grub change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0" save, update grub and reboot. Problem solved. Plasma is stable. I tested extensively.