A laptop's touchpad is on the chipset's I2C bus, found only through ACPI
(PNP0C50 / ACPI0C50), and SchOS had no I2C at all, so the touchpad of
every recent laptop did nothing.
kernel/acpi/i2c_hid.c drives the DesignWare I2C controller every x86
chipset uses (AMDI0010 on Ryzen) by polling, speaks HID over I2C to the
device the _DSM points at, and feeds the reports through the USB HID
parser. On AMD the interrupt pin's level is read every tick, so a report
is read exactly when one is waiting; elsewhere the input register is polled.
The touchpad is driven in mouse mode, which it starts in after a reset:
motion, clicks and taps become /dev/input/event1 like any mouse. The HID
parser now prefers a descriptor's relative pointer over an absolute one
for this, and takes descriptors from transports other than USB.
Untested on hardware: QEMU emulates no I2C touchpad.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4