Comment 309 for bug 606238

I reviewed Kevin Cernekee's touchpad code for Dell E6230, E6430, E6410 submitted as a patch set to the linux-input listserve. This is the main avenue for linux input driver patch submissions.

It looks like it has the same functionality as Ben Garami's fix for the E6430 but is a lot cleaner: hardware init, interface protocol and overall driver cleanup. It sounds like several people have tested Kevin's patch and found it to work (with a couple questions posted.)

@Emmanuel Thome: I can't tell from the thread whether your fixes for the 6230 are still necessary. It sounds like Kevin's patch with an X_BITS/Y_BITS tweak should be sufficient.

My thinking is, I will:
1. install Kevin's patches on an Ubuntu 12.04 baseline. His patches are for 12.10 so it should be compatible.
2. investigate some clues Kevin sent me to better understand the hardware init sequences for the N5110 and try to incorporate them.
3. merge the mt and init fixes from florin9doi
4. release a new roll-up dlkm for testing

I will discard the ACPI code, as it is not very useful. Apparently Linus was accurate when he stated "ACPI is a complete
design disaster in every way."

The documentation for the alps driver should be put in $KERNEL/Documentation/input/alps.txt I added some for the V5 and V6 protocols, but will need to update it for the new patches. If anyone wants to cross-reference system models and alps devices, that would be the place to do it.

After a test period I will submit a patchset based on acceptance of Kevin's already submitted patchset for inclusion in upstream builds. I know the Fedora maintenance team expects to put this in their next major release.