Arch Linux

Pacopag

Member

Registered: 2011-05-29

Posts: 287

[SOLVED] Touchpad (ELAN) woes

I've been finding in the last year or so that many laptops that I use with linux (all distros, not just Arch), are having a lot of issues with laptop touchpads/clickpads (or whatever they're called these days.  I've done lots of googling the last few days and it's apparent that many people are having similar issues, and there are some bugs filed, etc.

In general, I'm wondering if issues with ELAN touchpads in particular are widespread, if there are fixes upstream, if we can expect some improvements in the next major kernel release, and when we can expect the next major kernel release.

In particular, I have a laptop with ELAN1200 touchpad, which works fairly well, but often starts glitching.  While it's glitching, I see lines like this in dmesg

[ 6257.003167] i2c_hid i2c-ELAN1200:00: i2c_hid_get_input: incomplete report (16/65535)

I've set up a hotkey to run the following script that gets everything running smoothly again

rmmod i2c_hid
modprobe i2c_hid

That's ok, I guess, but rather annoying to have to do that every few minutes to have a working touchpad.

Is there anything else I might do for a more permanent fix?  Is this something I might expect to be resolved in a future kernel update?

I also have another laptop with ELAN0501 touchpad, and it's much worse.  Running the same script as above, but with the hid_multitouch module, gets the touchpad working, but it only works until the cursor stops moving.  Then the touchpad doesn't work at all until I run that script again.  This is pretty much an unusable workaround.

Please let me know if there is any other info/output you might need to provide better insight.

Thank you

Last edited by Pacopag (2019-02-26 20:01:56)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 63,982

Re: [SOLVED] Touchpad (ELAN) woes

lsmod | grep psmouse

If it's loaded, try reloading it w/ "elantech_smbus=0 synaptics_intertouch=0", https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … le_options

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Pacopag

Member

Registered: 2011-05-29

Posts: 287

Re: [SOLVED] Touchpad (ELAN) woes

lsmod | grep psmouse

psmouse               172032  0
libps2                 20480  2 atkbd,psmouse
serio                  28672  6 serio_raw,atkbd,psmouse,i8042

Then I ran

rmmod psmouse
modprobe psmouse elantech_smbus=0 synaptics_intertouch=0

But I don't think it worked, as the glitchyness happened just a short time afterwards.

Pacopag

Member

Registered: 2011-05-29

Posts: 287

Re: [SOLVED] Touchpad (ELAN) woes

I hope I'm not jumping the gun here, but since I reloaded i2c_hid, it's been pretty much fine all day so far.

In summary

rmmod psmouse
modprobe psmouse elantech_smbus=0 synaptics_intertouch=0
rmmod i2c_hid
modprobe i2c_hid

And to make it persistent

echo "options psmouse elantech_smbus=0 synaptics_intertouch=0" | /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf

Note: Someone might want to check my work in this last line.

Thanks seth!