Out of courtesy, just a quick message thank you for your help and pointing me in the right direction with this issue. I'm closing it after further consultation with linux-usb contributors. Here is the reason copied from my RH Bugzilla submission: I've been collaborating the last 6 days with powertop and linux-usb contributors upstream over this issue. They have been very helpful. What we've managed to do is establish exactly what has changed and where using a number of different trace methods. There's basically not a bug as such, it is a setting that has been fixed in 4.12 and above that never worked before. The value for power stored in the /sys/bus/usb/devices/2.1.3/power/control file for this device was being ignored when set to auto (Good) by powertop with kernel 4.11 and instead a non-existent setting of ON is used. ON means no autosuspend as power saving is 'Bad' in powertop tunable terms. with 4.12 it is not being ignored. So what I'm going to do now is investigate masking that setting with powertop by removing it as a system service and coding a script (found something similar done for another distribution so I'm going to at least try it) to autostart powertop at boot ignoring the pointing device. OR using something else like tlp which I have no experience with. Either way, this is clearly not a bug after further investigation upstream so I'm closing it. I will post the powertop solution if I can get it worked but this should remain closed from here on in.