Laptop trackpoint (pointing stick) detected as "PS/2 Generic Mouse". Bug?

[Jaime]

I have installed Bookworm on an HP EliteBook 850 G1 and the trackpoint
is unusably slow. The first thing that I notice is that the kernel is
detecting the trackpoint as a "PS/2 Generic Mouse":

[62635.123626] input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as
/devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input59


I have tried all 4 options for the psmouse module protocol parameter:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse ; sudo modprobe psmouse protocol=bare
sudo modprobe -r psmouse ; sudo modprobe psmouse protocol=imps
sudo modprobe -r psmouse ; sudo modprobe psmouse protocol=exps
sudo modprobe -r psmouse ; sudo modprobe psmouse protocol=any

but the trackpoint is always detected as a generic mouse. Also, the
problem persists whether I use the stable kernel (6.1.0) or the
backports kernel (6.12.12).

Is this a kernel bug? Is there a workaround?

[Marco Moock]

Post by Jaime
I have installed Bookworm on an HP EliteBook 850 G1 and the trackpoint
is unusably slow. The first thing that I notice is that the kernel is
[62635.123626] input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as
/devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input59

Normal on my HP ZBook.
You can change the speed, either in the gui or with xinput.

xinput gives you the list, xinput list-props ID gives the values.

You can then increase the speed.

[Jaime]

Post by Marco Moock
You can change the speed, either in the gui or with xinput.
xinput gives you the list, xinput list-props ID gives the values.
You can then increase the speed.

Hi Marco. Thank you for your reply.

Yes, I have changed the speed to maximum using "xinput set-prop":

xinput set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "libinput Accel Speed" 1

but (even though this setting does improve the speed of the pointer)
the pointer is still unusably slow and difficult to move.

I have found a workaround - I have an xorg snippet which tells xorg to
use "evdev" rather than "libinput" for this trackpoint, but I would
rather not have to use this workaround. (I assume that you are using
the "libinput" driver for your trackpoint and not the "evdev" driver.)

I think that perhaps my next step is to "adjust the magic trackpoint
multiplier" as it explains in the libinput documentation:
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.22.0/trackpoint-configuration.html
but I have to do more research to work out how to do that.