Re: issues with touchpad after update

[Brett Lymn <blymn%internode.on.net@localhost>]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2018 at 01:21:11PM +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> 
> I don't have any (yet) settings in sysctl . Mine wopere 12 and 5:
> 

That means you don't have the latest synaptics driver, I updated the
default values after feedback from Martin.

> 
> using your values, I can use the touchpad "normally", that is, with only 
> one finger it does the job, which is already something :)

Good.

> Scrolling however is almost unusable, very jerky, speeds up and moves 
> around, but really "happens" only when I put two fingers on it.
> 

It should only happen when you put two fingers on the touchpad.  If you
are seeing cursor movements when you have two fingers on the touchpad
then you need to increase:

hw.synaptics.finger_scroll-hysteresis

but you need the latest synaptics code to do that due to a bug that
prevented you setting the value in the older version.  This stops the
driver flicking between two finger scroll and cursor movement randomly -
the higher the value the longer it stays in scroll mode.

> Reading the values, the one I had as "min" should however be fine, since 
> it is the minimum width and I have pretty large fingers, they will be 
> never close together.
> 

I have pretty large fingers too - I think the difference is how the
touchpad reports fingers.  On my touchpad I don't get a width reported
for a finger, it just gives me a special width value that says one
finger is on the touchpad.  I do have a later version of firmware on my
touchpad though.

> 
> 
> in dmesg I see:
> 
> [     1.020391] pms0 at pckbc1 (aux slot)
> [     1.020391] pms0: Synaptics touchpad version 7.4
> [     1.020391] pms0: Extended W mode, Palm detect, Multi-finger Report
> 

Mine is:

[     1.160334] pms0 at pckbc1 (aux slot)
[     1.160334] pms0: Synaptics touchpad version 8.1
[     1.160334] pms0: Extended W mode, Passthrough, Palm detect, One button click pad, Multi-finger Report, Multi-finger

> I am actually unsure my touchpad is Multi-finger! I don't think, it has 
> a "scroll area" on the right (which never worked on NetBSD, only on Windows)
> 

The capabilities you see are decoded from queries made to the touchpad.
On initialisation the driver asks the touchpad what it is capable of,
what you see in dmesg is what the touchpad says it can do.

> Given the above test, it indeed appears to be multi-touch! But not 
> usable... the Scroll bar at right was probably something specific to the 
> windows driver (I don't have windows anymore... I used the other 
> partition to test Haiku) [1]
> 

I don't have a scollbar so I cannot test that but I am thinking that I
need to rework the handling of the two finger scroll, it is very
sensitive - I am thinking I should change the scaling on it to be a
divisor instead of a multiplier so that large movements don't produce
too many scroll events - the X server really doesn't like lots of scroll
events.

-- 
Brett Lymn
"We are were wolves",
"You mean werewolves?",
"No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely",
"Oh"