On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 4:00 AM, Daniel Kurtz <[email protected]> wrote: > Back in October Chase Douglas [1] kicked off a flurry of patches and > discussions on this mailing list about adding Clickpad support, and/or some > form of multitouch gesture processing (what little is possible with > Synaptics Advanced Gesture Mode) to the xf86-input-synaptics driver (and/or > the kernel). The patches were commented upon, and rehashed a little... but > now everything seems to have died down - and, as far as I can tell, nothing > has yet been accepted into xf86-input-synaptics upstream. > [1] Starting with > this: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-October/013809.html > As a result of this work, in late December Henrik Rydberg submitted a patch > [2] to linux-input, based on the discussions above, which added semi-mt > support to the synaptics kernel driver. This patch, too, though, has not > yet been accepted upstream. > [2] https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/426561/ > > What is the status of the kernel driver patches?
Henrik's semi-mt patch has been submitted and I believe it will be in kernel 2.6.38. It is only indirectly related to clickpads though. It allows 2 fingers worth of data to be reported to userspace; which is an improvement over having to emulate 2 fingers based on finger width. Chase had some additional kernel patches to try and improve clickpad-specific behaviour on kernel side but those were scrapped. It is better to do in user land but semi-mt reports are a prerequisite for that. > What is the status of the effort to use them from user space? > > Are patches still being reviewed/tested/worked on for xf86-input-synaptics > to use Synaptics AGM to improve clickpad performance? I do not believe anyone is working on it now. Some patches were submitted to this list around January (I think) to ignore bottom 20% of clickpad to allow for clickpad button presses without cursor movement and I think versions of that patch exist in multiple distributions. I believe that approach was basically rejected for inclusion in upstream. Its not how windows or macs work for clickpads and more of an easy hack. No one is working on "ideal" solution that I've heard of (see description below). > Was a decision made to not bother with xf86-input-synaptics, and instead to > focus only on mtdev & xf86-input-multitouch? For clickpads, I believe its just no body working on it but seems reasonable to add to xf86-input-synaptics. It would help move things along if someone donated a clickpad to maintainer of xf86-input-synaptics. > Is semi-mt supported in mtdev? No but to be clear semi-mt isn't about clickpads. Semi-mt is about rough way to report 2 finger coordinates to user land. Even if mtdev adds support for semi-mt, it will not automatically mean clickpads are working. What clickpads need is unique gesture logic that turns what normally would be a 2-finger scroll gesture into a 1 finger movement non-gesture when it sees button clicked. There is some finger tracking logic needed as well to decide which of 4 rectangle points in semi-mt report is the corner related to "movement". The whole Xinput 2.1 stuff is in active development. Its hard to answer were this clickpad logic should be implemented. Today it would be in xf86-input-synaptics but I'm not sure if it would need to move to something like utouch in the future. Its kinda a special case and perhaps will always stay in xf86-input-synaptics. Chris _______________________________________________ [email protected]: X.Org development Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel
