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⇱ Haptic Touchpad Support Expected For Linux 6.18 - Phoronix


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Haptic Touchpad Support Expected For Linux 6.18

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 23 September 2025 at 05:48 PM EDT. 6 Comments
The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to land initial haptic touchpad support as part of the HID subsystem updates.

Haptic touchpads contain force sensors and haptic actuators in place of a traditional button. Haptic touchpads can eliminate mechanical parts and provide a nice clicking effect across the entire touchpad. Google has been leading the work on haptic touchpads for Linux in motivated by their own Chrome/Chromium OS efforts.

The initial haptic touchpad support and wiring it up to the Linux HID multi-touch driver is queued up to the hid-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window.

This Linux 6.18 haptic touchpad support is initially tailored around the Elan 2703 haptic touchpad but in the future will surely be extended to more parts coming to market.

👁 haptic patches


The haptic touchpad support is in for-6.18/haptic as part of HID.git and since merged to HID's for-next Git branch and thus expected to be submitted as part of the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.