Touchpad not detected on Tong Fang GK5CN5

[mr-simon]

I've raised this as an issue on the Linux bug tracker, but it could be a config problem that someone here can help me with...

I have a Tong Fang GK5CN5 laptop (quite a new release), branded as a PC Specialist Recoil II. The device has an integrated touchpad, which, according to my reading is an i2c hid device.

I initially had a problem that closely matched the symptoms of another bug, and I have applied the patch from it. However, it turns out that although the patch included there gets rid of some of my errors, the touchpad is still not showing up as a device. I'm still running the patch from that bug because I'm pretty sure it's solving a problem that I have, but I have an unpatched kernel that I can try things out on as well.

I'm not sure where to look next because I don't really know much about how i2c works, but there are some errors that may be of interest:

If I press the physical button that enables the touchpad, after disabling it, I see this in dmesg:

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[  254.890450] i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.4: BIOS is accessing SMBus registers
[  254.890459] i801_smbus 0000:00:1f.4: Driver SMBus register access inhibited

I am also seeing these errors from i2c_hid, during boot:

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> dmesg | fgrep i2c_hid
[    4.872189] i2c-core: driver [i2c_hid] registered
[   21.154505] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: probe
[   26.229183] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: failed to reset device.
[   32.306945] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: failed to reset device.
[   38.383950] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: failed to reset device.
[   44.461676] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: failed to reset device.
[   45.501198] i2c_hid i2c-UNIW0001:00: can't add hid device: -61
[   45.501422] i2c_hid: probe of i2c-UNIW0001:00 failed with error -61

Does anyone know what might cause this, or where to start looking to find out more information on what to do next?

Thanks

[hhfeuer]

You're buying strange kind of hardware...
When it comes to finding out info about touch devices and develop support for it, I find this thread highly educational:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1526312

[mr-simon]

You're buying strange kind of hardware...

Alas, you're not wrong. It was so much cheaper than the alternatives, but as you say... It's weird. It's blazing fast and everything else is great, apart from the touchpad not working.

Actually, the battery life could be a bit better... I'm still fighting with Intel/Optimus/Bumblebee.

When it comes to finding out info about touch devices and develop support for it, I find this thread highly educational:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1526312

Thanks, that looks like a good place to start. Wish me luck... ;-)

[NTwoO]

@mr-simon: Did you manage to get things working with the TongFang? I'm looking to pick up one of these with the 144Hz screen and the 2060 GPU. Yesterday I had a look at the laptop and the build quality is not too shabby. Sure, it is not Dell/Apple, but for the price it is nice and tasty. The cooling also looks good and the mechanical switches do their work very well! I understand that the backlight can be controlled to a minimal level with the BIOS and if all else fails, then using a mouse will just have to do. The touch pad is not the worst.

[mr-simon]

@mr-simon: Did you manage to get things working with the TongFang? I'm looking to pick up one of these with the 144Hz screen and the 2060 GPU. Yesterday I had a look at the laptop and the build quality is not too shabby. Sure, it is not Dell/Apple, but for the price it is nice and tasty. The cooling also looks good and the mechanical switches do their work very well! I understand that the backlight can be controlled to a minimal level with the BIOS and if all else fails, then using a mouse will just have to do. The touch pad is not the worst.

Yeah, I wrote a patch for the touchpad which got accepted and is in recent kernels. There biggest issues I have with the laptop is that I have trouble getting it to resume from sleep/hibernate, and it chews through the battery FAST.

If you have designs to use it as an actual laptop, I would be cautious. The battery is small and it's compounded by the fact that the LCD is wired up to the nvidia card so you can't turn it off. I have a boot config that lets you select a different item from the grub menu that runs X on the internal GPU only, and another that runs it on the nvidia GPU... But you have to tell the intel version to output to the nvidia card. I did mess around with primus but it didn't help a lot with the battery life so I went with this approach instead.

Running on intel, I get almost 2 hours out of it. That's it. - It's a portable desktop, rather than a laptop IMHO.

But it's hella fast for the money, so it's a good thing to run Gentoo on - things compile quickly.

I did chat to one person with the 144Hz screen who was having problems with it, but I never got to the bottom of whether that was related to the screen or something else. ymmv,

[NTwoO]

thanks for the feedback. It is very helpful. My desktop machine has a 6700k and it most certainly helps for gentoo. I usually don't use my laptops as pure laptops, but the extent you mention is a little too tight. I'm not a big gamer, but keeping a machine like this dual boot does add the possiblity to play around with some Steam titles or for toying with Blender. Otherwise I'll go for an Asus or Dell XPS/Inpsiron with better battery life and no GPU. Just chuck a GPU in the desktop machine...

[mr-simon]

Yeah. It makes a *great* development machine, but I usually use it plugged in. It plays games pretty well (you *definitely* need it plugged in for that) but I run them under Gentoo instead of dual-boot.

Overall I'm very happy with it, but the battery *is* an issue.

[NTwoO]

I decided to go with the I5 inspiron 7590 with the 1650 and 97Wh battery. It's quite a happy chappy with an extra 8GB ram and a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the second bay. Battery life is a dream and since I have a beefy desktop the laptop should have some endurance. Thanks for the advice.