multitouch and synaptics clickpad questions

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2011 at 06:00:35PM +0800, Daniel Kurtz 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

Last patchset I had in my inbox (and reviewed) was
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-December/016870.html
and I never saw follow-ups. IIRC the patches were close enough to being
mergeable though and there is no explicit reason why we shouldn't merge
them (provided the feature is still wanted).

The way the discussion went afterwards though is that the feature was
sort-of rejected. It wasn't the actual solution to the problem, merely an
introduction of a new feature that works around deficiencies in the lower
layer.

I don't think anyone is working on it at this point.

Cheers,
  Peter

> 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/
> 
> 
>    1. What is the status of the kernel driver patches?
>    2. What is the status of the effort to use them from user space?
>       1. Are patches still being reviewed/tested/worked on for
>       xf86-input-synaptics to use Synaptics AGM to improve clickpad performance?
>       2. Was a decision made to not bother with xf86-input-synaptics, and
>       instead to focus only on mtdev & xf86-input-multitouch?
>       3. Is semi-mt supported in mtdev?
>    3. What is the status of xf86-input-multitouch, anyway?  It doesn't
>    appear to be an "official" X input driver, supported and maintained, for
>    example, by this mailing list.
>    4. And what about utouch?
>       1. Is that replacing mtdev/xf86-input-multitouch?
>       2. Is it Ubuntu specific?
>       3. Or is it being merged into the X.org / Xinput2 system?
>       4. Or will it live as an independent but cooperative userspace
>       component of an X system?
> 
> Sorry for jumping in, late to the party, and asking so many potentially
> off-topic questions to the mailing list at large.  I'm more than happy to
> post elsewhere if more appropriate.  This just seems like a good place to
> start.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Daniel

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