libinput uses the touchpad pressure values to detect wether a finger has been placed on the touchpad.
This is Information provided by the kernel and combines with a libinput-specific hardware database to adjust the thresholds on a per-device basis. libinput uses pressure thresholds primarily to filter out accidental light touches but pressure information is also used for some Palm detection.
Pressure thresholds are not directly configurable by the user, rather it is planned that libinput provides custom pressure thresholds for each device where necessary. See Debugging touchpad pressure ranges for instructions for your local device.
Information provided by the kernel
The kernel sends multiple values to inform userspace about a finger touching the touchpad. The most basic is the EV_KEY/BTN_TOUCH boolean event that simply announces physical contact with the touchpad. The decision when this event is sent is usually made by the kernel driver and may depend on device-specific thresholds. These thresholds are transparent to userspace and cannot be modified.
Many contemporary touchpad devices provide an absolute pressure axis in addition to BTN_TOUCH. This pressure generally increases as the pressure increases, however few touchpads are capable of detection pressure. The pressure value is usually related to the covered area - as the pressure increases a finger flattens and thus covers a larger area. The range provided by the kernel is not mapped to a specific physical range and often requires adjustment. Pressure is sent by the ABS_PRESSURE axis for single-touch touchpads or ABS_MT_PRESSURE on multi-touch capable touchpads.
Some devices provide additional touch size information through the ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR/ABS_MT_TOUCH_MINOR axes and/or the ABS_MT_WIDTH_MAJOR/ABS_MT_WIDTH_MINOR axes. While the kernel documentation specifies how these axes are supposed to be mapped, few devices forward reliable information.
Debugging touchpad pressure ranges
This section describes how to determine the touchpad pressure ranges required for a touchpad device and how to add the required hwdb entry locally. Note that the hwdb entry is not public API and may change at any time. Users are advised to report a bug with the updated pressure ranges when testing has completed.
First, install the "evemu" package providing the evemu-record tool. Run evemu-record as root (without arguments) to see a list of devices and select the touchpad device. Pipe the actual output of the tool into a file for later analysis. For example:
$ sudo evemu-record > touchpad-pressure.txt Available devices: /dev/input/event0: Lid Switch /dev/input/event1: Sleep Button /dev/input/event2: Power Button /dev/input/event3: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard /dev/input/event4: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad /dev/input/event5: ELAN Touchscreen [...] Select the device event number [0-19]: 4 # Ctrl+C to quit, the output will be in touchpad-pressure.txt
Now move a finger at normal pressure several times around the touchpad, as if moving the cursor normally around the screen. Avoid any accidental palm touches or any excessive or light pressure.
The event recording is then filtered for pressure information, which is sorted and exported to a new file:
$ grep --only-matching "ABS_MT_PRESSURE[ ]*[0-9]*" touchpad-pressure.txt | \
sed -e "s/ABS_MT_PRESSURE[ ]*//" | \
sort -n | uniq -c > touchpad-pressure-statistics.txt
The file contains a list of (count, pressure-value) tuples which can be visualized with gnuplot. Copy the following into a file named touchpad-pressure-statistics.gnuplot:
set style data lines plot 'touchpad-pressure-statistics.txt' using 2:1 pause -1
Now, you can visualize the touchpad pressure curve with the following command:
$ gnuplot touchpad-pressure-statistics.gnuplot
The visualization will show a curve with the various pressure ranges, see this bugzilla attachment. In most cases, the thresholds can be guessed based on this curve. libinput employes a Schmitt trigger with an upper threshold and a lower threshold. A touch is detected when the pressure goes above the high threshold, a release is detected when the pressure fallse below the low threshold. Thus, an ideal threshold combination is with a high threshold slightly above the minimum threshold, a low threshold on the minimum threshold.
Once the thresholds are decided on (e.g. 10 and 8), they can be enabled with the following hwdb file:
$> cat /etc/udev/hwdb.d/99-touchpad-pressure.hwdb libinput:name:*SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad:dmi:*svnHewlett-Packard:*pnHPCompaq6910p* LIBINPUT_ATTR_PRESSURE_RANGE=10:8
The first line is the match line and should be adjusted for the device name (see evemu-record's output) and for the local system, based on the information in /sys/class/dmi/id/modalias. The modalias should be shortened to the specific system's information, usually system vendor (svn) and product name (pn).
Once in place, you need to run the following to commands, adjusted for your device's event node (see How to apply hwdb changes):
sudo udevadm hwdb --update
sudo udevadm test /sys/class/input/eventX
If the pressure range property shows up correctly, restart X or the Wayland compositor and libinput should now use the correct pressure thresholds. The Helper tools can be used to verify the correct functionality first without the need for a restart.
Once the pressure ranges are deemed correct, report a bug to get the pressure ranges into the repository.
