Bug 60977

Summary: USB mouse not detected by X if not present at boot
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Sean O'Connell <sean>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Michael Fulbright <msf>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.2CC: teg
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2002-05-01 18:57:13 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Sean O'Connell 2002-03-11 05:35:18 UTC
Description of Problem:

If you have configured USB mouse support via /dev/input/mice in your
Xserver but boot the computer (a laptop) w/o the mouse plugged in at
boot time, the Xserver will not pick up on it if you choose to use it
later on. This is due to the Xserver not being able to see the input
device because the hid and mousedev modules are not autoloaded at boot
w/o the mouse being there. Note: this is using a stock redhat built kernel
(2.4.9-31 at the moment).

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


How Reproducible:

Always.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. configure usb mouse for X11
2. boot computer w/o mouse in
3. insert mouse once in runlevel 5 

Actual Results:

Xserver doesn't respond to mouse.

Expected Results:

USB is a hot pluggable device .. it should be detected, attached and work.

Additional Information:

I was able to fix this in two ways .. one was a bit more than the
other.

The hackish fix was to add
/sbin/modprobe hid
/sbin/modprobe mousedev

to /etc/X11/prefdm to have the modules loaded immediately before the
Xserver started.

A better fix (I think) was to fix it by adding

post-install usb-uhci /sbin/modprobe hid
post-install usb-uhci /sbin/modprobe mousedev
options -k hid mousedev

to my modules.conf .. due to the way /etc/rc.sysinit initializes the
usb support, I was unable to use the more generic reference to usb-controller
in the post-install stanzas (it loads the specific module name rather than
the alias which is there .. any reason?).

I guess that kudzu needs to do this automagically or should /etc/rc.sysinit
just load the mouse/keyboard support automagically if requested perhaps via a
mechanism like /etc/sysconfig/usbdevs .. MOUSE=yes, KEYBOARD=no ..

Comment 1 Sean O'Connell 2002-03-11 05:37:12 UTC
I filed it under kudzu, but maybe initscripts might have been more appropo.

Comment 2 Sean O'Connell 2002-03-21 14:00:48 UTC
As a follow up to this, I have not been able to get the modules.conf
setup to work reliably. Alas, only the hackish way of doing the mod-
probles in /etc/X11/prefdm has worked consistently for me. Is this
working due to a race condition?

Comment 3 Bill Nottingham 2002-03-21 22:01:32 UTC
Probably the best way to handle this is to have hotplug kick the X server so
that it reopens the mouse device.

Comment 4 Sean O'Connell 2002-03-21 22:15:23 UTC
But could you do that in such a way as to not kill a current
xsession? That is really what prompted this.. I hate to have
to do a ctrl+alt+bksp just use my hotpluggable mouse. The
prefdm hack works (I cannot explain why, per se). The other
thing that would be nice would be a userland mouse abstraction
daemon (a la .. dare I say it .. FreeBSD's moused, which back in
my bsd days would allow me to share focus between usb mouse and
on board mouse). I was never able to get gpm under linux to do
what moused could do under FreeBSD.

Comment 5 Trond Eivind Glomsrxd 2002-04-08 21:52:59 UTC
Not an issue for hotplug. You could have a X configuration with multiple devices
in it, both active, if you want to  and anaconda wants - it shouldn't break
anything.

Comment 6 Jeremy Katz 2002-04-09 23:15:54 UTC
Deferring to a future release.  The real "right" answer is to use the new input
layer stuff from 2.5 (lets you use ps2 and usb both from a combined input mutex
similar to how usb mice work already)

Comment 7 Michael Fulbright 2002-06-21 04:08:14 UTC
I think we've come up with a solution that will make this case work.

Comment 8 Sean O'Connell 2002-06-21 13:54:29 UTC
cool. i am curious to hear what you came up with.

Comment 9 Michael Fulbright 2002-12-20 17:38:25 UTC
Time tracking values updated