Comment 34 for bug 998546

The device wasn't supported by the kernel before the patch, so it was running in mouse emulation mode. That is usually a firmware feature, we often see this on new touchpads before we add support and switch them to raw mode. To userspace (i.e. X.Org) it looked like a mouse device, the gesture support that betzi pointed out in Comment #2 (double click, right click, ...) was implemented in the firmware and looked like normal mouse buttons to us.

With the new kernel, the device is now switched to raw mode, i.e. we get the correct coordinates and we get multitouch features. evdev has supported MT since 2012 or so. What it doesn't do though is gestures though, so those got lost and now rely on the client stack. evdev does some right button emulation, but that's for legacy touchscreens, not true multitouch screens.

If you want this bug closed you need to either support the gestures in the client stack, or drop the patch that _enabled_ the device in the kernel so it goes back to firmware emulation mode. That is of course assuming that the gestures are the issue here, I've asked for more clarification. If the device doesn't work at all, it's a kernel issue but the fdo bug suggests that kernel 3.15 works.