Mainline synaptics touchscreen driver


 * Summary: Mainline synaptics touchscreen driver
 * Proposer: Tim Bird, Sony Mobile
 * Status: Not selected in 2013 to be sponsored by the CE Workgroup

Description
The synaptics touchscreen is used in many embedded project, particularly phones and tablets. However, it does not have a driver in mainline. This project would consist of mainlining it (submitting the driver and responding to community requests for enhancements.)

The driver has been submitted a number of times previously, so code is available, and many former issues have been addressed. This work was submitted in late 2012 by Christoper Heiny (a developer at Synaptics). Possibly, Synaptics engineers could assist with this effort.

Because there was not much resistance on the last submission attempt, it is possible this just fell through the cracks, and just needs a slight push to get it upstream. Or, there might be bigger issues.

It appears that the code was been accepted into Dmitry Korokhov's tree, but not progressed past that point, as of Jan 2013. Part of this project would be investigating why the code stalled, and resolving any outstanding issues to Dmitry's satisfaction.

Related work

 * May 2010 lkml submission: http://lwn.net/Articles/389931/
 * June 2011 lkml submission: http://lwn.net/Articles/449981/
 * Nov 2012 lkml submission: http://lwn.net/Articles/525557/
 * Jan 2013 changes: http://lwn.net/Articles/533550/
 * The patch set is sitting in Dmitry Torokhov's tree at: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/dtor/input.git/log/?h=synaptics-rmi4

Scope
It is notoriously difficult to estimate the time it takes to mainline something. Given the comments on the most recent submittal, however, this driver looks like it is pretty close. I would estimate 4 person-weeks.

Contractor Candidates
None yet.

Reasons for CEWG not selecting this project
Not enough AG members used this driver to be interested in collaborating on the funding of it. The Synaptics RMI4 driver is already in the driver/input tree, just not pushed to Linus. Synaptics is planning to do another push of this, so CEWG decided to wait and see the outcome of that work.