Comment 107 for bug 296610

Wow, that's a huge load of research :-) If we keep pushing like this, I think we can nail it.

About X11: X11 does support multiple independent mice. It does have a so-called 'core pointer' which most apps use, and which is all the mice merged together. But there should be a few apps around (games?) which can use them separately. Granted, this might not make much sense for a Multitouch device, so it would not be a big loss if we were forced to give up this goal and merge the two sets of buttons.

Why I send the buttons signals in a 9p packet to both devices is just for the reason documented in the code: My hardware doesn't differentiate. When I'm moving stick and touchpad at the same time, it sends 9p packets, and any trackpoint buttons pressed at the time are signalled in the 9p packet. So I just don't see how I could tell whether the button pressed is touchpad or trackpoint. (Which would be a requirement to implement a state machine as you suggested -- right?)

My Alps reports as

[254754.807079] alps.c: E6 report: 00 00 64
[254754.831702] alps.c: E7 report: 62 02 14

We won't be able to tell them apart automatically, unless we look at BIOS data or something, which gives us the laptop model :-(