Keyboard & mouse freezing issue

User Support Hardware Support
#1

Hello,

First time post as I only recently decided to try Qubes and have installed 4.0.3 on my dual Xeon E5465 server which has 24Gb RAM and two 160Gb HDD (one is used for Qubes and one for Backups).

I have most things working and have installed Fedora-32 template. Set this as default template for all Fedora AppVMs. I got audio working in my Debian-10 AppVM. I have now created two HVM - Linux Mint 20.1 and Windows 10. These all work fine. During install I decided to use Sys-Net for network and USB, although I only have PS/2 keyboard and mouse on this machine. USB does work fine in AppVM.

I am now getting random freeze of all keyboard and mouse and after waiting several hours (until no HDD activity), all I can do is total power off. On restart all seems to be fine. What can I do to troubleshoot this?

#2

Hi @russ64. Sorry to hear about that. There are a few threads already about qubes freezing. Have you checked them out already?

https://qubes-os.discourse.group/search?q=freeze

#3

In my experience Qubes mouse handling is quite fragile. Running a partially busy incoming net connection and wire speed (only 100Mb/s) transfer out from a Samba share on a domU would result in the mouse getting significantly behind - looked like a priority allocation problem… Qubes became pretty unusable - one had to stop and wait for the pointer to catch up otherwise it would get out of sync - even to the point of moving the mouse caused menu popups and selections - almost shut the system down that way once! Usually the mouse would just freeze and can’t do much without it. I found disconnecting, waiting 30 sec, reconnecting PS2 would usually get it back but a couple of times I had to connect it to sys-usb where it was auto detected and I could resume without any problems. Moved it back to PS2 after a restart (which I do rarely).

#4

I’ve seen the exact same problem on a machine with an Intel Xeon processor as well. I was not able to figure out what the reason was.

#5

Thanks for all the replies. I guess that in future I should create the usb-sys VM when installing Qubes.

I suspect that my issue is something to do with my Windows-10 HVM, which works okay but is a bit limited with standard Microsoft basic drivers as current PV-drivers (HID / keyboard / mouse does not work).