Arch Linux

kousu

Member

Registered: 2022-01-25

Posts: 14

Toshiba Synaptics touchpad breakdown

Sometimes my touchpad, dies randomly, refusing all motion but accepting clicks. Sometimes the motion comes back briefly and then dies again. It's a Synaptics TM3322 on a Toshiba Tecra X40-E laptop (device ID(?) TOS01fc PNP0f13). I'm using libinput; the same problem shows up under wayland and xorg. It happens especially often after suspend.

The wiki mentions that setting psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=0 should? might? fix the suspend issue. I never found this before because it always cleared up just by re-suspending or switching off with Ctrl-Alt-F4

Last night, I upgraded to

$ uname -a
Linux allium 6.19.11-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:33:01 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and the problem got much much worse. The mouse is unusuable at the display manager most of the time, and if I do manage to log in, it usually breaks down quickly (seemingly about the time I make the first click but I'm not 100% on that).

I ran

sudo libinput debug-events --verbose

and wiggled and clicked my mouse to figure out that on my system it's /dev/input/event12, and then I compared

sudo evtest /dev/input/event12
sudo libinput debug-events --verbose --device=/dev/input/event12

evtest reacts to all touches, but when broken libinput only shows POINTER_BUTTON events, not POINTER_MOTION. This makes it seem like libinput is doing something wrong, but I'm not 100% sure about that; there are differences in evtest between the working and broken cases (e.g. in the broken case evtest prints "type 3 (EV_ABS), code 57 (ABS_MT_TRACKING_ID), value ${n}" with ${n} incrementing each time I move my finger, while in the working case that it only prints/increments it each time I _press_ my finger ).  So I don't know, maybe that's a red-herring. evtest and libinput-debug-events are useful tools to know about though.

Resetting the driver with

sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

fixes it but it breaks again within a minute or so; sometimes it doesn't even fix it (or maybe it just rebreaks immediately).

I can see in dmesg

[  884.540694] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5680], y [..4760]
[  884.569535] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried min coordinates: x [1260..], y [1092..]
[  884.569562] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Your touchpad (PNP: TOS01fc PNP0f13) says it can support a different bus. If i2c-hid and hid-rmi are not used, you might want to try setting psmouse.synaptics_intertouch to 1 and report this to linux-input@vger.kernel.org.
[  884.626003] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 9.32, id: 0x1e2a1, caps: 0xf00223/0x840300/0x12e800/0x52d884, board id: 3322, fw id: 2658004
[  884.662759] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input6053

This contradicts the advice from the wiki, but I gave it a shot. I added `psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1` to my kernel command line and now the problem is gone. dmesg says:

[    9.530778] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5680], y [..4760]
[    9.557036] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried min coordinates: x [1260..], y [1092..]
[    9.557059] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Trying to set up SMBus access
[    9.612407] rmi4_smbus 6-002c: registering SMbus-connected sensor
[    9.681051] rmi4_f34 rmi4-00.fn34: rmi_f34v7_probe: Unrecognized bootloader version: 13 (^M) 16 (\x10)
[    9.681441] rmi4_f34 rmi4-00.fn34: probe with driver rmi4_f34 failed with error -22
[    9.700740] rmi4_f01 rmi4-00.fn01: found RMI device, manufacturer: Synaptics, product: TM3322-002, fw id: 2658004
[    9.776243] input: Synaptics TM3322-002 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.4/i2c-6/6-002c/rmi4-00/input/input14

I see some similar reports:

- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=296019 - unsolved, but had the helpful debugging tips I used above
- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=308454 - resetting with modprobe and psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1 temporarily fixes it; but it's not a permanent fix.
- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=310232 - click is broken; motion works; adding psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=0 (the opposite??) fixed it.
- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=310150 - crosspost the former.
- [linux-input] PROBLEM: Touchpad (PNP: TOS01f6 PNP0f13) not working under PS/2, requires psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1 to function via SMBus
  - this one seems to be precisely my issue; the fix was just adding the device ID string "TOS01f6" to some magic list in the synaptics driver

I hope if anyone else has a Toshiba that started acting up on them this week this post can help them out.

Also, what does psmouse.synaptics_intertouch actually do? Is not setting it different than setting it to 1 different than setting it to 0?
I found this post asking the same question but it just pointed at

$ modinfo psmouse  | grep intertouch
parm:           synaptics_intertouch:Use a secondary bus for the Synaptics device. (int)

which maybe enlightens someone but not me. Why does using a "secondary bus" suddenly clear up the instability? Why would not using a secondary bus clear up the crashes on suspend?

Last edited by kousu (2026-04-09 15:45:44)