Bug 487875

Description of problem:

In the past week on Fedora 10 with nightly yum updates I started seeing GNOME input/focus misbehaviors which I eventually found in .xsession-errors listed as an error of "last_focus_time" going backwards.

Changing current_clocksource from hpet to acpi_pm immediately stopped this behavior and I have not seen any additional problems.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

kernel-2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.x86_64

xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.5.3-13.fc10.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.5.0-4.fc10.x86_64 (using intel driver)
metacity-2.24.0-2.fc10.x86_64

Also using iwlagn from kernel.

How reproducible:

I am not sure if this happened the first time I rebooted with the new kernel, or if it required a combination of other recent packages (such as Xorg) to manifest. 

Steps to Reproduce:
1. with a Thinkpad X200 up to date with repo mirror as of 27 Feb 2009
2. reboot and use normal cpu frequency control for laptops, etc.
3. run a GNOME session with metacity window manager and no compiz
4. start interacting with multiple windows using focus-follows-mouse
5. make sure kernel clocksource is hpet

(I used the fedora repo mirror at mirrors.kernel.org for my 27 Feb 2009 update)

Actual results:

Multiple times per hours (sometimes only seconds apart) you lose the ability to click on anything or move focus to a window, even though you can still move the mouse cursor around the screen. These last_focus_time comparison errors show up in the .xsession-errors file, intermingled with other messages that may be unrelated.

Expected results:

The user input is never disrupted.


Additional info:

The failure seems unrelated to the specific combination of X apps, happening even with just basic gnome-panel interactions at the beginning of a session. It may be more repeatable with frequent task switching between a web browser, xterms, etc.  I do not know if a similar error can be manifested without using focus-follows-mouse policy in metacity or with another window manager. However no new metacity package has been released in correlation with this bug appearing (at least according to the metacity RPM changelog).

You can usually recover the focus and control via hot-keys to change virtual desktops. Sometimes, the only recovery is to switch to another VT and run metacity --replace to force things to reset.