The HID changes have been merged for Linux 6.18 and are headlined by initial support in the mainline kernel for haptic touchpad handling.
As written about last month, haptic touchpad support is ready for the Linux kernel. 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.
For Linux 6.18, Google engineers were focused on the Elan 2703 haptic touchpad as their initial support target. Google has been leading the work on haptic touchpads for Linux in motivated by their own Chrome OS needs.
In addition to the haptic touchpad support, another Linux 6.18 HID addition worth noting is the Sony DualSense controller audio jack handling work.
Some of the other HID changes include HID-BPF to be able to re-bind a driver to hid-multitouch, making hidraw ioctls safer, PIDFF improvements, and better configuration of Intel QuickI2C via ACPI.
More details on these HID feature updates for Linux 6.18 via this merge.
