X.Org synaptics support for the Lenovo T440, T540, X240, Helix, Yoga, X1 Carbon

Updates: 30 April 2014, for the new INPUT_PROP_TOP_BUTTONPAD

This is a follow-up to my post from December Lenovo T440 touchpad button configuration. Except this time the support is real, or at least close to being finished. Since I am now seeing more and more hacks to get around all this I figured it's time for some info from the horse's mouth.

[update] I forgot to mention: synaptics 1.8 will have all these, the first snapshot is available here

Lenovo's newest series of laptops have a rather unusual touchpad. The trackstick does not have a set of physical buttons anymore. Instead, the top part of the touchpad serves as software-emulated buttons. In addition, the usual ClickPad-style software buttons are to be emulated on the bottom edge of the touchpad. An ASCII-art of that would look like this:

+----------------------------+
| LLLLLLLLLL MMMMM RRRRRRRRR |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
| LLLLLLLL          RRRRRRRR |
+----------------------------+

Getting this to work required a fair bit of effort, patches to synaptics, the X server and the kernel and a fair bit of trial-and-error. Kudos for getting all this sorted goes to Hans the Goede, Benjamin Tissoires, Chandler Paul and Matthew Garrett. And in the process of fixing this we also fixed a bunch of other issues that have been plaguing clickpads for a while.

The first piece in the puzzle was to add a second software button area to the synaptics driver. Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" now allows a configuration in the same manner as the existing one (i.e. right and middle button). Any click in that software button area won't move the cursor, so the buttons will behave just like physical buttons. Option "HasSecondarySoftButtons" defines if that button area is to be used. Of course, we expect that button area to work out of the box, so we now ship configuration files that detect the touchpad and apply that automatically. Update 30 Apr: Originally we tried to get this done based on the PNPID or DMI matching but a better solution is the new INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD evdev property bit. This is now applied to all these touchpads, and the synaptics driver uses this to enable the secondary software button area. This bit will be aviailable in kernel 3.15, with stable backports happening after that.

The second piece in the puzzle was to work around the touchpad firmware. The touchpads speak two protocols, RMI4 over SMBus and PS/2. Windows uses RMI4, Linux still uses PS/2. Apparently the firmware never got tested for PS/2 so the touchpad gives us bogus data for its axis ranges. A kernel fix for this is in the pipe. Update 30 Apr: every single touchpad of this generation needs a fix. They have been or are being merged.

Finally, the touchpad needed to be actually usable. So a bunch of patches that tweak the clickpad behaviours were merged in. If a finger is set down inside a software button area, finger movement does no longer affect the cursor. This stops the ever-so-slight but annoying movements when you execute a physical click on the touchpad. Also, there is a short timeout after a click to avoid cursor movement when the user just presses and releases the button. The timeout is short enough that if you do a click-and-hold for drag-and-drop, the cursor will move as expected. If a touch started outside a software button area, we can now use the whole touchpad for movement. And finally, a few fixes to avoid erroneous click events - we'd sometimes get the software button wrong if the event sequence is off.

Another change changed the behaviour of the touchpad when it is disabled through the "Synaptics Off" property. If you use syndaemon to disable the touchpad while typing, the buttons now work even when the touchpad is disabled. If you don't like touchpads at all and prefer to use the trackstick only, use Option "TouchpadOff" "1". This will disable everything but physical clicks on the touchpad.

On that note I'd also like to mention another touchpad bug that was fixed in the recent weeks: plenty of users reported synaptics having a finger stuck after suspend/resume or sometimes even after logging in. This was an elusive bug and finally tracked down to a mishandling of SYN_DROPPED events in synaptics 1.7 and libevdev. I won't provide a fix for synaptics 1.7 but we've fixed libevdev - please use synaptics 1.8 RC1 or later and libevdev 1.1 RC1 or later.

Update 30 Apr: If the INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD is not available on your kernel, you can use DMI matching through udev rules. PNPID matching requires a new kernel patch as well, at which point you might as well rely on the INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD property. An example for udev rules that we used in Fedora is below:

ATTR{[dmi/id]product_version}=="*T540*", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="top_softwarebutton_area"

and with the matching xorg.conf snippet:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Lenovo T540 trackstick software button buttons"
        MatchTag "top_softwarebutton_area"
        Option "HasSecondarySoftButtons" "on"
        # If you dont have the kernel patches for your touchpad 
        # to fix the min/max ranges, you need to use absolute coordinates
        # Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "3363 0 0 2280 2717 3362 0 2280"
        Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 8% 42% 58% 0 8%"
EndSection

Update 30 Apr: For those touchpads that already have the kernel fix to adjust the min/max range, simply specifying the buttons in % of the touchpad dimensions is sufficient. For all other touchpads, you'll need to use absolute coordinates.

Fedora users: everything is being built in rawhide Update 30 Apr:, F20 and F19. The COPR listed in an earlier version of this post is not available anymore.