Mouse Freeze / Unresponsive touchpad on 2015 12,2 mbp

[LinuxTom]

Hi all I am creating this topic as I have just ran into an issue regarding my mouse / touchpad on my 2015 12,2 Mac Book Pro mbp. It was working one moment then nothing. It doesn't respond to movement or scrolling. However fortunately the keyboard still works.

[LinuxTom]

I figured out a solution to my issue. While in my case a restart of the machine will fix the issue that can be a little inconvenient if you have unsaved changes or were in the middle of something. Some of the commands below are specific to my hardware but the general diagnostic steps might be helpful to others. Fortunately our keyboard is still working this will allow us to do some trouble shooting.

Launch a terminal with CTRL + ALT + t

It is probably a good idea to check the system logs. You can do this by running

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$ journalctl

gg will take you the top(start of the logs) and G will take you to the bottom(latest logs) you can go up with k or down with j and you can even search with /. Alternatively if you have this computer you can run

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$ journalctl | grep bcm5974

I got a lot of output to the terminal. Chances are we will find an error. In my case one particular error stood out it was

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kernel: bcm5974: bad trackpad package, length: 8

What is bcm5974? That is a kernel module and in our case the one for our track pad. For those coming from windows think of it like a driver. If the module is loaded you can run

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$ lsmod | grep bcm5974

and it will output

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bcm5974                20480  0

Mine seems to be having and error so if we can reload it that would be a good idea. We can accomplish this by running

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$ sudo modprobe -r bcm5974; sleep 10; sudo modprobe bcm5974

Here we are using modprobe -r to remove the module and modprobe to load it again. My track pad is back to working now.

When ever I have trouble with a mouse or keyboard that stops working it almost always has been able to be resolved by reloading the kernel module the mouse / keyboard was using.

[Reddog1]

I know you have this sorted out, but you mentioned that your trackpad had been working but it suddenly quit? And your solution shows that it was definitely a driver issue. Was this a new install, or one that you've been using for a while? Did you do a kernel update recently, perhaps? If the answer is "yes", I'd suggest you look there for the cause (kernel updates can fix things or break things). And, Broadcom stuff for macs isn't very well supported in some kernels, from my experience. Broadcom Apple wifi is hit or miss without installing proprietary drivers, for one.

[LinuxTom]

Yes the track pad had been working and then randomly it decided not to work. This wasn't that new of an install probably a couple months since I got a new ssd and did a fresh install. No I haven't updated the kernel recently. I am still running the default 5.04 lts kernel and it has probably been about a month since I last did updates. I'm lagging a bit behind. You don't have to tell me about broadcom and macs. I also have a 2017 mbp and that broadcom wifi card hardly works with Linux not to mention getting the touch bar working. I am looking to get a new computer soonish but I am going to miss the trackpad on this computer. It's so smooth.

[Shahzeb]

All you need is to just change the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" in the /etc/default/grub by adding "i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop" and then "sudo update-grub"

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop"

Hope that's help
I found this somewhere on Ubuntu forums.