Comment 1 for bug 1533035

On some machines the touchpad itself failed when Linux i2c-hid driver fetched initial feature reports out of it. Looks like the corresponding Windows driver only fetches reports it needs and Intel suspect this is the only software used to validate the hardware.
When Intel follow what Windows driver does touchpads works fine. Intel push such fix into v4.4 kernel:
6d4f5440a3a2bb2e9d0d582bbf98234e9e9bb095 HID: multitouch: Fetch feature reports on demand for Win8 devices

However, it turns out that there are other issues as well. These are related to I2C host controller and are not limited to Dell laptops but instead there seem to be at least one Lenovo (Yoga 900) laptop where the same problem occurs. Intel sent the fix patches to community and the patches will be merged into v4.5 kernel.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/11/30/441