Touchpad "randomly" stops working (Possibly out of scope)

[rottenpants466]

Hi,

I've been having this issue for a long time but since I mainly use a mouse for work this doesn't affect me too much, although sometimes I have to use the touchpad and it's rather infuriating. I don't know if this happens to other people as well.

Like it says in the title, sometimes the touchpad randomly stops working for a few seconds and starts working again. This issue occurs multiple times in a single session, doesn't matter if it's a fresh boot, after suspend/resume. It's not related to a specific kernel version, distribution, proprietary or nouveau drivers.

From what i could find this is related to laptops equipped with an Nvidia gpu. Doing a quick search I found a couple of examples of people with the same issue:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2402420
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/touchpad-stops-working/167461
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=434897
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=422399
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/762320/msi-laptop-touchpad-stops-working-on-linux
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1cy9wpz/touchpad_problem_in_ubunbtu/

The problem may be related with power management, when it powers up and powers down the Nvidia gpu the touchpad stops responding and starts working again after some seconds.
I tested this: when i open the nvidia panel (or any application that uses the dedicaded nvidia gpu) and then close it, after a few seconds the touchpad stops working. I can check the power consumption using powertop and this is indeed the case. When the gpu is powered down, the wattage consumption goes down and the issue occours.

Has anyone run into the same problem?

Edit:

My laptop is a MSI Summit E16 (A12UCT model) and it's supported by msi-ec.
#10

CPU: i7 1280P
GPU: Iris Xe + Nvidia RTX 3050

[glpnk]

Touchpad is connected through SMBus (i2c) with fallback to ps/2. So in fallback mode there would be no multi touch support.

• Maybe some component or device generates too much noise?
• Or TP ribbon is worn off or corroded?
• Touchpad board should be grounded through laptop frame or motherboard.

Anything from this shouldn't be broken, unless you've disassembled laptop or spilled liquid on touchpad.

[glpnk]

Can you restart touchpad with hotkey?

[rottenpants466]

Yeah I tried that as well, it registers the enable/disable hotkey but it doens't do anything when the touchpad is not responding.

Edit:

I just remembered that I opened an issue in the libinput bugtracker a while ago, if you wish you can check it out: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/927

I did a couple of tests to try and find out the issue but no luck at that time. Since then i found out that it's somehow related to the nvidia gpu powering down.

[glpnk]

On "WMI1" laptops it's possible to control touchpad power or state through the EC. But this seems not possible on WMI2

Can you make EC dump

[rottenpants466]

Here you go.
ec_dump_202509151505188893.zip

[glpnk]

Thanks, nothing useful as I've thought.

[glpnk]

Have you found solution?

[rottenpants466]

Unfortunately I haven't found anything. I just filed a bug report here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220725

The cause might be related to the nvidia gpu when it powers down. Somehow its conected to the touchpad.