Linux 6.10 Is Making It Much Easier To Deal With Quirky Touchscreens

Right now when dealing with quirky/buggy touchscreens a C file needs to be manually manipulated and the Linux kernel recompiled. With a new "i2c_touchscreen_props" kernel command line option on its way to the mainline kernel, the process of overriding touchscreen properties is dramatically easier for those dealing with Linux on touchscreen-enabled devices.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede took up the challenge of improving the handling of dealing with quirky touchscreens and making it much easier for setting touchscreen properties in iterating through possible fixes or just for getting your device working while waiting on a proper Linux kernel patch to land. This new "i2c_touchscreen_props" option allows passing new touchscreen properties at boot time without the need to recompile your kernel. Considering touchscreens tend to be on low-power laptops/tablets, avoiding the need to recompile your kernel just to override/fix touchscreen properties is a big win.

This new "i2c_touchscreen_props" option was sent in on Thursday as part of the x86 platform driver fixes for the Linux 6.10 cycle. Hans explains in the patch adding this new option:

"On x86/ACPI platforms touchscreens mostly just work without needing any device/model specific configuration. But in some cases (mostly with Silead and Goodix touchscreens) it is still necessary to manually specify various touchscreen-properties on a per model basis.

touchscreen_dmi is a special place for DMI quirks for this, but it can be challenging for users to figure out the right property values, especially for Silead touchscreens where non of these can be read back from the touchscreen-controller.

ATM users can only test touchscreen properties by editing touchscreen_dmi.c and then building a completely new kernel which makes it unnecessary difficult for users to test and submit properties when necessary for their laptop / tablet model.

Add support for specifying properties on the kernel commandline to allow users to easily figure out the right settings."

This new "i2c_touchscreen_props" option should prove quite useful and much more convenient than having to recompile your kernel to deal with a problematic touchscreen.

This new option was submitted as part of this week's x86 platform driver fixes for the Linux 6.10 kernel.