Re: Why Cypress does not upstream its trackpad driver?

[Kamal Mostafa <kamal@canonical.com>]

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On Tue, 2012-11-06 at 17:47 -0500, Ozan Çağlayan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This driver [0] was written with a cooperation of Cypress, Dell and
> Canonical Engineers within the last 3-4 months. It is very nice that
> Cypress as a vendor cooperated with Canonical (Because Canonical works
> with Dell for their Project Sputnik and Dell XPS13 is used as the main
> hardware for that project and Dell XPS13 has this type of trackpad,
> Bingo!), and I am also glad that Ubuntu users benefits from this
> driver.
> 
> The driver brings multi-touch scrolling, disable-while-tapping and
> makes Fn+Fx touchpad disable/enable work for not only Dell XPS13 but
> for all laptops having this trackpad (My Lenovo Ultrabook U300s for
> example, I tested the patches on fedora 17's 3.6 kernel and it works
> quiet nice)
> 
> But what I am not getting that why NOBODY from Cypress/Canonical/Dell
> isn't bothering to push this driver to upstream?


In fact, Canonical is working on preparing the Cypress PS/2 trackpad
driver for submitting upstream.


> Is it too hard? I don't think so as the patches are quite non-invasive
> and small.


Your estimate of the work/risk involved not withstanding, I chose to
deploy this experimental driver in stages -- first in the oem-specific
"Sputnik project" kernel, then (recently) in the main Ubuntu kernel,
then finally (soon) upstream -- so as to minimize regressions while
shaking out the bugs.  For example, the version to which you linked does
include a regression (breaks some ALPS touchpads) which we discovered
only after deploying in Ubuntu.

I expect to submit the Cypress driver upstream within two weeks.  Of
course, my work on the driver is (and has been) publicly available[1].

 -Kamal Mostafa <kamal@canonical.com>

[1] The latest version of this driver is represented by the patch set:
    http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu%2Fubuntu-quantal.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=Cypress+PS%2F2


> 
> Is the only distribution around is Ubuntu?
> Is the only laptop sold in the world is Dell XPS13 with an Ubuntu?
> 
> I'm not trying to be impolite but it hurts me to see that a vendor
> produces an open-source driver for its device but makes use of it only
> through a specific distribution.
> 
> If Cypress is just beginning developing open-source drivers for their
> devices, I hope that after this mail they will be much sensitive about
> the issue and push their drivers even before the release of their
> devices to make user experience flawless.
> 
> (I googled and searched the archives of LKML and linux-input but
> couldn't find a discussion or patch series about the driver. If I
> missed it, ignore the whole stuff above)
> 
> [0]: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/178903/
> 


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