[PATCH synaptics] Add movement constraints to clickpads to prevent cursor jumps

[Peter Hutterer]

On 15/06/2014 03:48 , Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 14.06.2014 20:44, Gabriele Mazzotta wrote:
>> On Saturday 14 June 2014 17:47:27, Alexander E. Patrakov
>> <patrakov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 13.06.2014 15:22, Gabriele Mazzotta wrote:
>>>> It appears that 71652fe ("Ignore motion the first X ms after a
>>>> clickpad click") is not enough to prevent unwanted cursor jumps when
>>>> two different fingers are used to respectively move the cursor and
>>>> click. The jumps are due to the small delay between the actual click
>>>> and
>>>> the moment the finger is placed on the clickpad. Because of this delay,
>>>> the two events are sometimes seen as independent from each other and
>>>> since the finger detection happens first, the motion is not ignored.
>>>
>>>> Add a constraint on the distance covered to prevent jumps.
>>>> The difference between two detections along the x axis has to be
>>>> smaller than 1/4 of the clickpad width and smaller than 1/4 of the
>>>> height along the y axis.
>>>
>>> See also https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76722 for a
>>> similar bug in libinput. In that case, though, I was able to trace it to
>>> a touchpad firmware bug.
>>
>> What I understood from your bug report is that you have jumps even
>> when both
>> the fingers are on the touchpad, is that correct?
>
> Not quite. The most common scenario (for me) where a huge jump or
> sometimes a huge scroll event is generated is:
>
> 1. I decide to place the pointer somewhere and left-click.
> 2. I place the right index finger on the touchpad.
> 3. I move the pointer approximately near the desired position, which
> often happens to be near the center of the touchpad.
> 4. I do two things simultaneously:
> 4a. I direct my left index finger to the left virtual button, with the
> intention to click.
> 4b. I finish the right index finger movement, with the intention to
> bring the pointer exactly to the correct position and then to remove the
> finger.
> 5. The following two events happen in unpredictable order, because I
> don't really care about the order:
> 5a. I remove the right-hand index finger from the touchpad.
> 5b. I place the left-hand index finger on the touchpad in the left
> virtual-button area.
> 6. I click using the left index finger.
>
> If events 5a and 5b are separated by less than, say, 20 ms, the touchpad
> misreports them: it says "the finger moved from the center to the
> bottom-left corner" (i.e. reuses the tracking ID), instead of "one touch
> disappeared in the center, and one appeared in the corner".

the polling rate is 80Hz, which makes it 12.5 ms, so your analysis looks 
pretty spot-on. The problem is: I'm not a big fan of having some magic 
threshold in the driver that applies to everything. I was hoping that we 
can look at the timestamps of the events and the history of previous 
events and detect when there is such a jump going on.

I don't have direct solution, so this is just thinking aloud: the event 
sequence you're likely to get is a number of events grouped together, 
then an event outside of that group, followed by a number of events 
closely grouped together. If we can reliably make that detection we 
should be able to insert the required touch up/down with a bit of delay 
before replaying the events correctly.

Again, this isn't a real solution yet, but maybe it helps with an idea 
(or at least an approach) to tackle this.

Cheers,
   Peter