Thanks for your work Ulf. By the way I brought a new laptop, X1 Carbon gen2 for you from Toronto.
It's a gift from deraadt@. It has a soft-button synaptics and a USB touchscreen. Cheers, Martin On 20/08/17(Sun) 22:17, Ulf Brosziewski wrote: > As people might want to know what they have worked for, it's probably > time for a summary of the first test results and my conclusions. > (But please don't get that wrong: more tests and reports are and will be > welcome.) > > Hardware: Most tests were made with (PS/2) Synaptics touchpads, and it > seems there are no problems with common models of "OpenBSD laptops". > Few quirks and bugs have been reported for older and less common ones, > and concern things that should be handled by the hardware driver. Alps > and Elantech models are rare, and it looks like most Mac users are on > holiday. > > Driver mechanisms: No serious problem has come up. It has been > observed that there are (too) long delays between the start of a scroll > gesture and the first scroll event. I'm already testing an improved > version of the handler. There will still be a short delay, because > it reduces the risk that you produce scroll events unintentionally. > > Features: Not surprisingly, some people are missing certain features. > What has been mentioned is 1) "disable-while-typing", 2) edge areas > (where initial contacts don't move the pointer or generate tap events), > 3) multi-finger clicks, and 4) "coasting" (that is, scrolling continues > for some time after the scrolling fingers have been lifted). Up to now > my impression is that 1) and/or 2) could be prominent, maybe 3). > However, there are no decisions about additional features yet, each one > would need some care. > > 1) and 2) are different approaches to the same task: suppressing outputs > of accidental contacts, usually palm or thumb contacts, so in this > context one might also think of: 5) palm and thumb detection based on > contact width, pressure, and other attributes, perhaps. 1) is based on > a simple principle, but it needs coordination with another driver, and I > am not sure whether it is a good solution, or despair. What's a > reasonable timeout here? If it's too short, it only mitigates the > problem, if it's too long, it can be a nuisance. 5) might work well for > some users, with some touchpads, but it may be difficult to find useful > generalizations. I'm currently checking variants of 2), the basic > mechanism is already present in the driver (it's required for software > buttons and edge scroll areas). But again, it's too early for > conclusions, and surely we want to avoid a patchwork of half-general and > half-successful solutions. > > Default configuration: The defaults, including the "hidden" ones, seem > to be acceptable for many models. I will increase the default scroll > speed (moderately). In some cases, the height of the button area on > clickpads is problematic. This is not as trivial as it may seem. > Coordinate limits are not always correct, and resolution values can be > unreliable - if they are present at all. There is actually a good deal > of guess work in the configuration. Improving that will need more work > on the hardware drivers. > > As I have written, not all touchpad drivers cooperate with the input > driver up to now. I hope this will change soon. It's not ready yet, > but some work on imt/hidmt has already been done, with help of Remi. > > Thanks again for the friendly, competent, and helpful feedback! > > > On 07/31/2017 11:02 PM, Ulf Brosziewski wrote: > > In the long run the synaptics driver, which handles touchpad inputs in > > X, may be a dead end of the input framework, and it's time to prepare > > an alternative. The kernel contains an internal touchpad input driver > > now, it's a part of wsmouse(4). It provides standard features - > > two-finger/edge scrolling, software buttons for clickpads, tapping - > > and various kinds of plankton required for usability. > > > > If you have a new snapshot (from July 27 or later) on a laptop with a > > Synaptics, Apple, Alps, or Elantech-4 touchpad, you could help with > > tests [...] >
