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I've been running this system for about two years using i3, and never had a problem.
After a recent systemwide update -- sometime in the last week or so -- pressing any of the function keys apart from F1/F2/F3 causes an odd hang/freeze in X. I noticed it particularly due to Shift+Insert (which is Shift+Fn+End on this system) hanging X.
The mouse will sometimes work for a while after the keypress, but will also sometimes disappear. I can always Ctrl+Alt+F<n> to get to the console and kill the relevant process. (`killall i3` doesn't manage to kill the process, but `killall -9 i3` will.)
I'm not getting any odd messages in dmesg, journalctl, or from the xsession itself. I use startx from the console to open X, not a login manager.
I've tried doing this whilst running `xev`. While X does sometimes hang entirely, I've also occasionally seen it still registering keystrokes in xev, but XLookupString gives a blank output after I've pressed the offending keystrokes. Pressing "Fn" on its own doesn't cause the hang.
I've tried downgrading the kernel to 4.19.11, alongside the associated tp_smapi and acpi_call modules in case it was related to that, but no luck. Without any apparent errors being logged, I'm really quite stuck here!
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As an update: I haven't solved this, but after coming home and plugging in my external keyboard the same behaviour seems to happen when I use some of its media keys.
I have a Vortex Pok3r. The insert button is mapped to Fn+semicolon, and that works fine. I just noticed, though, that when I hit Fn+w, which is mapped to XF86AudioPlay, that it caused the same behaviour as the original post.
Still very confused, but now with some extra information. This isn't just a Thinkpad issue!
It does, however, seem to be happening on my other Thinkpad, now that I've updated it. Same configuration (git cloned to each machine). Shift+insert works fine on the second machine, where Insert is a separate key. Pressing the brightness key up or down, which is a special Thinkpad button, causes the same freezing behaviour. The volume up and down buttons don't seem to cause an issue.
Very odd!
Last edited by tealeaf (2019-01-03 14:51:07)
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As a follow-up, this has resolved itself as of the latest upgrade on 2019-01-10.
I noticed that both the kernel and acpi_call (which seems like it could potentially be related) have both been updated. (4.20.1-arch1-1-ARCH)
No idea what was causing it, but I'm happy that it works.
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