Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd Generation To Have Better Touchpad Input On Linux 5.4

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 16 November 2019 at 07:11 AM EST. 6 Comments
HARDWARE
With a change merged Friday night for the nearly over Linux 5.4 cycle, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Gen laptop should see better touchpad input support.

Red Hat's Lyude Paul has enabled the RMI mode for the X1 Extreme 2nd Generation. "Generation
Just got one of these for debugging some unrelated issues, and noticed that Lenovo seems to have gone back to using RMI4 over smbus with Synaptics touchpads on some of their new systems, particularly this one. So, let's enable RMI mode for the X1 Extreme 2nd Generation.
"

The Synaptics RMI(4) mode is the modern protocol used by the hardware for touch input handling and should yield a better input experience for users with less quirks.

With the enabling of RMI mode for this laptop just requiring its LEN0402 ID to be added to a list, it was safe for the current Linux 5.4 cycle (and for back-porting to stable series) rather than needing to wait for Linux 5.5.

The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 was launched earlier this year with Intel 9th Gen Core processors, options for NVIDIA GPUs, up to two NVMe SSDs, up to 64GB of RAM, and other impressive specs.
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