Kernel 5.15.16 touchpad does not work

March 22, 2022 — BarryK

Testing EasyOS 3.4.3, forum member BologneChe reported that the Xorg synaptics driver has not loaded.

I tested on one of my laptops, same problem. Hmmm, yes, running with the 5.10.93 kernel:

# dmesg | grep -i touchpad
[   30.593545] input: ELAN0501:00 04F3:305B Touchpad as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:17.0/i2c_designware.0/i2c-0/i2c-ELAN0501:00/0018:04F3:305B.0002/input/input8
[   34.523678] input: ELAN0501:00 04F3:305B Touchpad as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:17.0/i2c_designware.0/i2c-0/i2c-ELAN0501:00/0018:04F3:305B.0002/input/input13

However, with the 5.15.16 kernel, there is no match for "touchpad".

So, the 5.15.16 kernel is not recognizing touchpads. I compared the kernel configurations:

CONFIG_I2C_HID=y in 5.10.93, this parameter is not in 5.15.16
CONFIG_I2C_HID_ACPI is not set in 5.15.16, this parameter is not in 5.10.93

A quick search, found the problem started with 5.12:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/n5ou1t/kernel_5121_touchpad_driver_gone/

OK, will have a go at fixing this, will recompile 5.15.16 kernel.

Tags: easy