Linux 3.4 is close to be released and this version includes a device driver I was working on my free time a few months ago for the Cypress TrueTouch Gen3 family of touchscreen micro-controllers.

So, now these devices found on many embedded devices such as the HP Touchpad, Sony Xperia phone and the Nook Color e-reader are fully supported on Linux and the driver is using the stateful multi-touch protocol type B (identifiable contacts and slots) taking full advantage of the hardware finger tracking capabilities.

Many thanks to Kevin McNeely from Cypress that provided me the last version of Cypress’s Android Gingerbread driver and for answering all my questions about the device operation and hardware registers. First I thought I could just forward port this driver and post it for upstream inclusion. But after posting Cypress’s driver, I had so many change requests from the kernel hackers that I had to basically rewrite the driver (the most important issue was that it used input MT protocol type A instead of B).

The Linux multi-touch and input maintainers, Henrik Rydberg and Dmitry Torokhov helped me a *lot* reviewing my patches, explaining me the correct approach to report the contact slots to the input MT layer and pointing me out lots of issues with the driver. I wish all the Linux subsystem maintainers were as constructive and willing to help as Henrik and Dmitry.

I had fun working with the driver and now the Linux installation on my Nook Color is more close to functional. My next step is to work on the LCD panel driver that’s still not supported. A touch-screen without a panel is not very useful besides running evtest on a console to see how the input evens are reported to user-space 🙂

Finally, if you are a hardware vendor and want your device supported on Linux or have an out-of-tree driver that needs to get merged on the mainline kernel, please drop an email to sales@collabora.co.uk, we will be more than pleased to work with you to make that happen.