New Touchpad & Touchscreen Support, Better Dell Canvas Support In Linux 4.15

The HID and input pull requests have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window.

SUSE's Jiri Kosina sent in the HID driver updates this morning. The Dell Canvas Interactive Pen/Totem Display is seeing better support in Linux 4.15. The Wacom driver for the Dell Canvas has been updated to now make use of the high resolution data for its pen rather than the previous data utilizing that was at half the resolution. The Wacom driver in general has seen some pen handling fixes and other generic work too with this HID update.

HID in Linux 4.15 also has some i2c-hid driver improvements around Intel Apollo Lake powered laptops, eraser tool support in the HID input driver, a new ALPS touchpad is supported, and other changes. The new ALPS T4 touchpad that's to be supported by Linux 4.15 is what's used by the HP Elitebook 1000, Zbook Studio, HP Elitebook x360, and other newer laptops.

The list of the HID changes for the Linux 4.15 merge window can be found via this PR.

On a related note, the input driver updates have been submitted for Linux 4.15 already. Those changes include three new touchscreen drivers: EETI EXC3000, HiDeep, and Samsung S6SY761. The Samsung S6SY761 touchscreen is a multi-touch capacitive screen used by some mobile devices. The EETI EXC3000 is found in some drawing pads / tablet type devices while not much can be found on the HiDeep devices.