phantom ESC key stream activity

[Paul Vojta]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 01:10:22PM -0500, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> Hi Vladimir,
> 
> (I hope you don't mind me steering this conversation back to the mailing
> list?)
> 
> On Thu 2017-01-05 @ 12:33:55 PM, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
> >   X11 should be receiving the stream via Linux input layer. I would suggest
> > to check for changes to Linux kernel and, in particular, any power saving
> > settings.
> 
> Yes, there was a kernel update for openSUSE 42.1 recently, 3 days ago, which I
> applied at that time.

When you say "receiving the stream", do you mean receiving the stream of
spurious Esc characters?  If so, then they're probably generated within the
X server itself.  The X server is receiving a "make contact" code for the
Escape key but no corresponding "break contact" key, so it's doing autorepeat.

To check whether this is what is happening, try fiddling with the
-arinterval argument to the X server and see if it changes the frequency
of the spurious Esc characters.  That's the X server command line, so
it's probably buried in gnome or xfce or kde somewhere, unless you're
starting X via startx.  I don't know if it's possible to change this in a
running X server.

--Paul Vojta, vojta at math dot berkeley period edu