Elantech touchpad driver for Linux

Introduction

The Elantech touchpad is found amongst others in MSI laptops and the Asus EeePC 9xx and 1xxx. This driver adds support to the Linux kernel so the touchpad can be used with the Xorg Synaptics driver and the different configuration utilities that exist for it.

Upstream kernel

The driver has been added to the upstream kernel. Patching of your kernel is no longer necessary with kernel 2.6.28.

WARNING: You will need Xorg Synaptics driver 0.99.1 or newer (0.99.2, 0.99.3) to interoperate with the 2.6.28 kernel Elantech driver!

Xorg Synaptics drivers before 0.99.1 require that the kernel touchpad driver reports pressure information whether or not the actual hardware is capable to do so or not. To be able to use the available Xorg Synaptics driver as is and work around this deficiency, the Linux drivers on this page pretend to report pressure information (i.e. always the same value for a touch and zero for no touch).

However, the driver included in kernel 2.6.28 faithfully represents the actual hardware (as it should) and does not report made-up pressure data. This necessitates a change to the Xorg Synaptics driver that has recently been added. Version 0.99.1 is the first release that you can download as a tar.gz file that includes this required change.

Versions

Version 5

Version 5 of the driver builds upon the cleanup of v4 and adds support for the new Elantech touchpad model and its different protocol as found in the EeePC.

Version 4

This is a cleanup release of the driver that removes support for relative mode as requested by the linux input subsystem maintainer. It brings the driver a step closer to being included in the mainline kernel. Using the Xorg Synaptics driver is now recommended.

Older versions

Version 3: Absolute mode fix for certain models; Reconnect handler for suspend and resume
Version 2: Working absolute mode implemented
Version 1: Initial release

Download

Version 5

Below are two patches. One that adds the v5 driver to vanilla kernel 2.6.26.5, and one that updates the driver already in 2.6.27-rc5-mm1 to version 5.

Patch for vanilla kernel 2.6.26.5: elantech-v5-2.6.26.5.patch

Update for kernel 2.6.27-rc5-mm1: elantech-2.6.27-rc5-mm1-to-v5.patch

Version 4

Below are two patches. One that adds the v4 driver to vanilla kernel 2.6.26.5, and one that updates the driver already in 2.6.27-rc5-mm1 to version 4.

Patch for vanilla kernel 2.6.26.5: elantech-v4-2.6.26.5.patch

Update for kernel 2.6.27-rc5-mm1: elantech-2.6.27-rc5-mm1-to-v4.patch

Feedback

This driver can only improve with the feedback of users and testers out there. So if anything isn't working as expected don't hesitate to contact me. When contacting me could you please include the output of

dmesg | grep elantech

in your email so I know what kind of touchpad you have?

Email me at: arjan AT opmeer DOT net.