MSI laptop touchpad stops working on Linux

Question

I have a MSI Prestige 14H B12, bought in july. I'm having troubles with the touchpad, which stops working after a while in the login screen. The situation has been the same, but with different scenarios, since I first installed Linux on it. Note that I also have Windows and the touchpad works properly on this OS in all cases.

My first install was OpenSUSE Thumbleweed with KDE and the touchpad would stop working a few seconds after boot, at the login screen or desktop, depending on how fast I authenticated. In that case, the touchpad would work if the laptop was plugged in to AC. After an update broke GPU drivers and ended up breaking the kernel and the install, I started to test other OS, trying to also solve the touchpad issue. I found different scenarios like the touchpad not working at all or even working only while using the battery, but it would break one way or another. So, I decided to go back to Mint and installed Mint 20, which was the bootable that I had in hand. With this install the touchpad worked correctly, but after doing an upgrade to Mint 21, it would stop working after boot, just like in Thumbleweed, but this time didn't work on AC neither. Because of this I fell back to OpenSUSE (this time Leap, to avoid the previous incident) and stayed there until I had to wipe Windows partitions and when reinstalling I accidentally wiped out OpenSUSE's boot partition and found out after it was already overwritten.

I know it doesn't looks quite like that, but this is long-story short, each time I did searches in google, forums (I even made a question in OpenSUSE forums, you can find the discussion here) but anything of what I found solved the problem. I wrote to MSI and their only answer was that they would only test their products on Windows. So, this time I installed Mint 21.2 Cinammon Edge (as I had troubles with the WiFi driver, but from kernel 6.1 it works properly) and found an scenario quite similar to the previous Mint attempt. After the fresh install the touchpad worked properly on all cases, but when I did an apt upgrade, it ended up like before: it stops working at all a few seconds after boot, on AC or battery. This is the install that I'm keeping, so I'm giving it another try to this touchpad headache.

This is my inxi -Fxz output (was requested to be able to post at Linux Mint Forums, but later you'll find it's relevant):

System:
  Kernel: 6.2.0-36-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A
    Desktop: Cinnamon 5.8.4 Distro: Linux Mint 21.2 Victoria
    base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: Micro-Star product: Prestige 14H B12UCX v: REV:1.0
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Micro-Star model: MS-14F1 v: REV:1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: E14F1IMS.118 date: 04/28/2023
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 56.4 Wh (84.2%) condition: 67.0/70.0 Wh (95.7%)
    volts: 16.3 min: 15.4 model: MSI BIF0_9 status: Discharging
CPU:
  Info: 10-core (6-mt/4-st) model: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12650H bits: 64
    type: MST AMCP arch: Alder Lake rev: 3 cache: L1: 864 KiB L2: 9.5 MiB
    L3: 24 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1860 high: 2700 min/max: 400/4600:4700:3500 cores:
    1: 450 2: 2700 3: 491 4: 2700 5: 473 6: 2700 7: 495 8: 2700 9: 2700
    10: 2700 11: 460 12: 2700 13: 400 14: 2700 15: 2700 16: 2700
    bogomips: 86016
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel Alder Lake-P GT1 [UHD Graphics] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: i915 v: kernel bus-ID: 00:02.0
  Device-2: NVIDIA GA107M [GeForce RTX 2050] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: nouveau v: kernel bus-ID: 01:00.0
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.4 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
    unloaded: fbdev,vesa gpu: i915 resolution: 3072x1920~60Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel Graphics (ADL GT2)
    v: 4.6 Mesa 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Alder Lake PCH-P High Definition Audio
    vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl bus-ID: 00:1f.3
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k6.2.0-36-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi vendor: Rivet Networks
    driver: iwlwifi v: kernel bus-ID: 00:14.3
  IF: wlo1 state: down mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 bus-ID: 3-10:3
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 0 state: up address: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 258.87 GiB (27.1%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Micron model: 3400 MTFDKBA1T0TFH
    size: 953.87 GiB temp: 32.9 C
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 124.94 GiB used: 17.75 GiB (14.2%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p6
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 96 MiB used: 32.3 MiB (33.6%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) file: /swapfile
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 43.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Info:
  Processes: 345 Uptime: 10m Memory: 31.04 GiB used: 1.67 GiB (5.4%)
  Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.4.0 Packages: 2317 Shell: Bash
  v: 5.1.16 inxi: 3.3.13

Now a very strange thing that happened when getting the data: when running inxi -Fxz (with the params, not just inxi) the touchpad started working again (on baterry or with AC) for a few seconds before stopping again, somehow similar to what happens on boot. I did a little experiment and set up a bash script running inxi -Fxz each 6 seconds to be launched on boot and the touchpad stops working and then starts again, if I set it to each 3 seconds, it doesn't stops, so I don't know what inxi calls that wakes it up again. Obviously, this isn't a very feasible solution and an even worst idea, but was for the sake of research. I've found on forums and comunities different theories of what it's happening (all about this laptop or similar models on Linux):

1. Touchpad is sensitive to voltage changes: in other blog I found somebody saying that their touchpad would stop working if the Prestige's NVIDIA was unused and would start again when using the GPU, but doesn't seems to be my case (or at least the "sensitivity" is not uniform) and in some cases it never worked at all
2. System settings or desktop environment issues: Someone in my OpenSUSE forum post said that this would not be the case as it started to happen since the login screen, also, every time the touchpad was enabled in the settings, and this is happening in different desktop enviroments, distros, and major distributions
3. Something like TLP interferring with the driver or the touchpad: This is due to someone saying here that solved the problem by disabling PCIe control on TLP but, unless previous distros preinstalled it, I never used TLP and the current Mint doesn't has it neither. The problem has been there since the fresh distro install
4. Issues at BIOS level: I found a similar thread on Ask Ubuntu from a few years ago where they say the problem was solved by booting with acpi=on flag, but I can't figure out how to do it correctly, when I follow the steps Mint just doesn't boot
5. Issues with the driver or specific driver being missing: I think this is where the issue is due to the behaivor that it had on Mint after upgrade, or after using inxi, like if something that worked out of the box breaks when it's updated. Also, someone in a forum reply (I can't find the link now) said that the driver wasn't working properly and used and alternative (which I can't name as I haven't found the post again, sorry). Though I can't understand the influence of inxi with its parameters in the touchpad working or not.

Please, I've been facing this issues for the last 4 months, it's kind of driving me crazy

Answer 1

I bought the same laptop recently and had the same problem, I found someone that pointed me in the right direction but I can't find where it was.

The touchpad (at least in my case) is disabled because of the PCIe Power Management configuration. It gets turned off together with the Nvidia GPU.

To try if this is the same case for you, you can try installing powertop. Shortly after boot, running it in a terminal with root privileges and turning Runtime PM for I2C Adapter i2c-14 (NVIDIA i2c adapter 1 at 1:00.0) to Bad in the Tunables section. In my case this also turns off PM for Runtime PM for PCI Device NVIDIA Corporation GA107M [GeForce RTX 2050].

This allows the device to stay powered on (thus consuming more battery, although it's not really noticeable in my experience) leaving also the touchpad awake.

For a more permanent solution, I followed the guide in the Arch Wiki (link here).

I changed the file /etc/udev/rules.d/pci_pm.rules to be as follows:

# blacklist for pci runtime power management
SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{device}=="0x25a9", ATTR{power/control}="on", GOTO="pci_pm_end"

SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{power/control}="auto"
LABEL="pci_pm_end"

You'll have to check the vendor and device IDs in case they don't match mine.

Hope this helps you!