Debounce In Bash To Fix Lenovo Touchpad And Trackpoint Lost Sync

Functional Debounce In Bash

Debounce is commonly used name for rate limiting function used in functional programming. For example it exists both in React and JavaScript. In Bash it can be implemented as follows:

debounce() {
  intervalInSeconds="$1";
  unixtime() {
    date +%s;
  }
  nextTimeLimit() {
    echo $(($(unixtime) + $intervalInSeconds));
  }
  limit=$(nextTimeLimit);
  while read line; do
    if test $limit -lt $(unixtime); then
      limit=$(nextTimeLimit);
      echo "$line";
    fi
  done;
}

Similarly useful function is foreach which I wrote post about as well.

Workaround For Lenovo Touchpad Lost Sync

I am having issues on my Lenovo Yoga X260 with freezing trackpoint and touchpad. I failed to find proper solution but at least I have following reasonable workaround which uses above debounce implementation.

The issue can be detected by Linux kernel logging following line:

[ 5416.628532] psmouse serio1: Touchpad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6

And can be immediately fixed by restarting psmouse module:

modprobe -r psmouse; modprobe psmouse

Using debounce function above I implemented a script to do just that automagically. I placed below script to be executed on startup with root privilages:

#!/bin/bash
#set -ue
# -o pipefail

foreach () {
  while IFS= read -r l; do
    eval "$@";
  done;
}

debounce() {
  intervalInSeconds="$1";
  unixtime() {
    date +%s;
  }
  nextTimeLimit() {
    echo $(($(unixtime) + $intervalInSeconds));
  }
  limit=$(nextTimeLimit);
  while read line; do
    if test $limit -lt $(unixtime); then
      limit=$(nextTimeLimit);
      echo "$line";
    fi
  done;
}

dmesg -w|
  grep "lost sync"|
  debounce 3|
  foreach 'echo restarting mouse; modprobe -r psmouse; modprobe psmouse;' &

Learn more about the foreach method above in this post.

Update 2023

This sudo modprobe -r psmouse; sudo modprobe psmouse turned out to be useful on my P52 also to restart trackpoint and buttons. What a blast from the past!