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  • Flickering mouse under heavy I/O operation

Since about this weekend my mouse flickers when I move it and copy files or dd an image to a USB stick in the background. The CPUs are okay and reboots etc. don't help. It doesn't happen if the CPUs are busy - just with high I/O. Solus 4 on a quad core i5 with 8 gigs of RAM and an nvme SSD. Any ideas what could cause that?

  • just replied to this.

    n2o ...or dd an image to a USB stick in the background.

    I noticed the same mouse behaviour. Don't have an answer, but try

    sudo ionice dd bs=4M status=progress if=... of=... && sync

    The key point here is the ionice command. It "revives" GUI during heavy I/O operations, and may be used with cp and mv as well.

    • n2o replied to this.
    • n2o likes this.

        just Thanks for the tipp! The funny thing is that I didn't have the problem until very recently. Just thought maybe someone knows what gives.

            n2o
            Seems like it's not a Solus-specific issue. I noticed mouse slowdowns under heavy I/O even in Arch recently. Nothing similar has ever happened in the past.

              n2o I agree with just. I have had that similar issue on Fedora 31 just recently too. (Copying data to 2xUSB drives)

                Hmm weird. You guys have NVMEs? On my older machines I haven't had the problem yet.

                • nate replied to this.

                  n2o Not me. I am using Solus on a dell latitude e5420. The HDD is SATA SSD

                    Okay. The issue does not occur on my SATA machine either. Funny!

                    Update: Solus on a newish Dell XPS13 quad core i5 - same thing. The mouse even flickers when loading web pages.