[Invalid] Mouse only usable within single application after mouse click on RHEL 7.6 (#18124)

[socratis]

@toracat this also happened to Fedora 28 & 29 (and other distros) with the release of the 4.17.0 kernel, and went away with the 4.17.4 release (all kernels between suffered from the problem). Please see VirtualBox ticket #17827 for details. It certainly isn't a RHEL 7.6 specific issue.

[toracat]

@nixuser

That info really helps. I'm now testing one of the patches from kernel 4.17.4. Will update this thread with the result.

[socratis]

I picked up one patch (commit 03ae3a9caf4a59edd32b65c89c375a98ce3ea1ef) as the candidate. Its description is:

The commit ba667650c568 ("Input: psmouse - clean up code") was pretty brain-dead and broke extra buttons reporting for variety of PS/2 mice: Genius, Thinkmouse and Intellimouse Explorer. We need to actually inspect the data coming from the device when reporting events.

I applied the patch to the centosplus kernel (kernel-plus) and made it available for testing here.

It seems to fix the mouse problem according to my brief testing.

[toracat]

Bug reports filed:

CentOS => https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=15570
RHEL => https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1658669 (private)

Please test the patched kernel if you are able. Feedback welcome.

[nixuser]

@toracat Testing the patched kernel proved to be a few orders of magnitude more difficult than I thought it would be. I finally got there though. The good news is that kernel-plus-3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.centos.plus.ay1.x86_64.rpm did not have the mouse problem, so for me the patch fixes that problem.

The bad news is that despite managing to eventually get the kernel-plus-devel and kernel-plus-headers and all the rest installed, and reinstalling development tools that got shredded when I uninstalled previous versions, and despite it appearing that I could successfully compile the VirtualBox guest additions (from 5.2.23 test build), they don't work correctly, I am stuck with a tiny screen. What I don't understand is that copy/paste between the host and guest does work, so the guest additions are partly working.

Could the patch be interfering with screen resize events?

[toracat]

@nixuser

That issue has just been raised in https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=90103&start=15#p435663. It looks as if kernel module vboxguest does not build under the plus kernel. I am investigating.

[nixuser]

Interestingly, vboxsf driver is working as well, so I can share folders between my CentOS guest and Win7 host. So the only thing not working with the guest additions is the video side of things.

[toracat]

Right. You can see which modules are loaded by running:

lsmod | grep vbox

It's supposed to show 3 of them, namely, vboxguest , vboxsf and vboxvideo. However in a troubled install, vboxvideo is missing which is responsible for resizing the window.

[toracat]

The issue of unable to build the vboxvideo kernel module is because of the fact it is kernel-plus. The patch is not the cause. In fact, the same kernel-plus without the patch exhibits the same problem. And of course the mouse issue comes back.

So, at least we now know that the proposed patch fixes the mouse issue. When the distro kernel is patched, all should be back to normal.

[nixuser]

Hopefully RedHat will fast-track this one.

[toracat]

Indeed. I'm trying to push the RH bugzilla I filed as hard as I can.

[toracat]

Good news!

I now have a new set of the centosplus kernel that does not have the vboxvideo build problem.

https://people.centos.org/toracat/kernel/7/plus/bug15570new/

Download the two rpm packages there and install them (yum localinstall ... ):

kernel-3.10.0-957.1.3.bug15570.plus.el7.x86_64.rpm
kernel-devel-3.10.0-957.1.3.bug15570.plus.el7.x86_64.rpm
(You don't need kernel-header)

Reboot to this kernel. And everything should work now including the mouse and window resizing.

Detailed explanation: In VirtuslBox's Makefile for vboxvideo, RHEL 7 kernels were picked up by looking for "el7.x86_64" in the name. The original plus kernel was named ".el7.centos.plus.xxx.x86_64" . As a result, this kernel was not regarded as a "RHEL 7.6 kernel". So in the new version I built the same kernel using "xxxx.plus.el7.x86_64" as the package name. Now Makefile sees this as a RHEL kernel and builds the vboxvideo module.

[nixuser]

3.10.0-957.1.3.bug15570.plus.el7.x86_64 works perfectly for me here, thank you.

[toracat]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[toracat]

Some progress made in the Red Hat bugzilla entry:

Status: ASSIGNED → POST
Priority: unspecified → urgent
Severity: medium → high