keyboard is intermittently ignored

keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Sam Steingold]

emacs cvs head on amd64:
every now and then the keyboard is ignored for a while, then everything 
is back to normal.
mouse works: I can select, paste, use menus (including undo), but the 
keyboard is silently ignored: I can type into xterm (actually, gnome 
terminal), thunderbird (like I am doing now), caps lock and num lock 
work fine - but emacs does not respond to any keypresses (including C-g 
and C-]). loadavg is 0.
I cannot figure out what triggers this behavior and why the keyboard 
input resumes (usually, after a few minutes of inactivity).
I am running under gdb, so if you tell me where to look, we can probably 
debug this problem together.
Thanks.
Sam.

Re: keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Chong Yidong]

Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> writes:

> emacs cvs head on amd64:
> every now and then the keyboard is ignored for a while, then
> everything is back to normal.
> mouse works: I can select, paste, use menus (including undo), but the
> keyboard is silently ignored: I can type into xterm (actually, gnome
> terminal), thunderbird (like I am doing now), caps lock and num lock
> work fine - but emacs does not respond to any keypresses (including
> C-g 
> and C-]). loadavg is 0.
> I cannot figure out what triggers this behavior and why the keyboard
> input resumes (usually, after a few minutes of inactivity).
> I am running under gdb, so if you tell me where to look, we can
> probably debug this problem together.
> Thanks.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to debug this using gdb.
If this bug occurs fairly often, one useful approach may be to try older
versions of Emacs CVS and see where the problem first appearred.  This
is somewhat time-consuming, but it should take at most five or six
iterations to pinpoint the source of the problem (assuming you use a
binary search).

Re: keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Jay Belanger]

> emacs cvs head on amd64:

For another data point, emacs cvs on x86.

> every now and then the keyboard is ignored for a while, then everything
> is back to normal.
> mouse works: I can select, paste, use menus (including undo), but the
> keyboard is silently ignored: I can type into xterm (actually, gnome
> terminal), thunderbird (like I am doing now), caps lock and num lock
> work fine - but emacs does not respond to any keypresses (including C-g
> and C-]).

I have a similar problem, but I never waited long enough to see if
keyboard input is restored.  I run emacs in stumpwm, when I haven't
typed for a while, the computer's power saver blacks out the screen.
Occasionally, when I start using the computer again, the keyboard is
useless.  I can use the mouse, and use it to exit emacs; when I restart
it, it works fine.  If the power saver blacks out the screen when another
application is running, there is no problem when I start using the
computer again.

Jay

Re: keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> writes:

  > emacs cvs head on amd64:
  > every now and then the keyboard is ignored for a while, then
  > everything is back to normal.
  > mouse works: I can select, paste, use menus (including undo), but the
  > keyboard is silently ignored: I can type into xterm (actually, gnome
  > terminal), thunderbird (like I am doing now), caps lock and num lock
  > work fine - but emacs does not respond to any keypresses (including
  > C-g 
  > and C-]). loadavg is 0.
  > I cannot figure out what triggers this behavior and why the keyboard
  > input resumes (usually, after a few minutes of inactivity).
  > I am running under gdb, so if you tell me where to look, we can
  > probably debug this problem together.

Not sure if this would help: but if you do not use gdb you can try to
strace emacs (i.e. strace -p EMACS_PID) at the time it gets stuck and
see if that shows if emacs is doing anything interesting at the time...

Re: keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Sam Steingold]

I can say more about this problem now.
when this happens, all frames ignore the keyboard except for the comint frame
(inferior ocaml, lisp, bash &c) which do respond.
i.e., I can type into the ocaml interaction buffer and then, after I do that,
other frames see the keyboard again too.
alas, if this happens when I do not have an interactive buffer, my only
recourse it so kill emacs...

Sam Steingold wrote:
> emacs cvs head on amd64:
> every now and then the keyboard is ignored for a while, then everything 
> is back to normal.
> mouse works: I can select, paste, use menus (including undo), but the 
> keyboard is silently ignored: I can type into xterm (actually, gnome 
> terminal), thunderbird (like I am doing now), caps lock and num lock 
> work fine - but emacs does not respond to any keypresses (including C-g 
> and C-]). loadavg is 0.
> I cannot figure out what triggers this behavior and why the keyboard 
> input resumes (usually, after a few minutes of inactivity).
> I am running under gdb, so if you tell me where to look, we can probably 
> debug this problem together.

Re: keyboard is intermittently ignored

[Stefan Monnier]

> I can say more about this problem now.
> when this happens, all frames ignore the keyboard except for the comint frame
> (inferior ocaml, lisp, bash &c) which do respond.
> i.e., I can type into the ocaml interaction buffer and then, after I do that,
> other frames see the keyboard again too.
> alas, if this happens when I do not have an interactive buffer, my only
> recourse it so kill emacs...

That doesn't sound like anything I know, or anything I could explain.


        Stefan