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ELAN 0634 touchpad in Lenovo ThinkBook 14iil not working under Linux

After having bought a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 iil for my daughter, I found that the touchpad wasn’t recognized during Linux (Opensuse Tumbleweed) install. I continued by plugging in a USB-mouse I had lying around. Unfortunately the problem persisted after having completed the installation.

I googled the problem and found multiple mentions for several linux distributions. As a reference I provide here the link to the Ubuntu launchpad which helped me most in getting things to work under Opensuse Tumbleweed:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1861610

For a record it should be mentioned, that this is a BIOS bug which originally should be fixed by Lenovo. As the touchpad works under Windows, this means they have fixed the driver instead… Awkward.

These are the steps I needed to do, to get the touchpad recognized:

Get ACPI table:

acpidump -b

Disassemble ACPI table:

iasl -d dsdt.dat

Edit DSDT:

vi dsdt.dsl

  • Search the HID of the touch pad: ELAN0634
  • Search the next _STA method declaration
    and comment out these four lines:

Method (_STA, 0, NotSerialized) // _STA: Status
{
//If ((TPVD == 0x45))
//{
Return (0x0F)
//}
//Return (Zero)
}

  • Increment the version number. It’s the last parameter of the DefinitionBlock (line 21 for me):
    DefinitionBlock ("", "DSDT", 2, "LENOVO", "ICL ", 0x20170002)
  • save

Compile DSDT:

iasl -sa dsdt.dsl

Copy compiled DSDT to /boot for easy loading by grub:

cp dsdt.aml /boot

Reboot, press e in grub menu on your linux boot entry and enter the following line before kernel loading:
acpi /boot/dsdt.aml
(Secure boot has to be disabled in BIOS!)

If the workaround works for you, add the line in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg in the relevant boot entry for getting the fix on each reboot.

As this is just an ugly (albeit working) workaround, I opened a bug request on opensuse bugzilla for getting it fixed in the standard kernel without having to meddle with the DST in the future:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1176971

Posted in IT

2 thoughts on ELAN 0634 touchpad in Lenovo ThinkBook 14iil not working under Linux

  1. For Win I’d propose to check with Lenovo for current drivers. No intensions with Win on myself. If I remember it correctly, it was a Win10 when delivered.

  2. Hey Steffen, Thanks for sharing.
    I just bought a Thinkbook 15 IIL and I’m having some trouble with the trackpad in windows 11.
    It is recognized and works fine, but no multi-touch or gestures are active at all.
    Any idea what this could be?
    You said it worked fine on windows on your end. Any help would be appreciated!

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