Hi,

I had a preliminary discussion with Benjamin Tissoires and according to
our agreement I repost it for wider audience.
Blacklisting the device was decided to be a bad idea.
But actually I managed to get touchpad totally operational via SMBus
using a following hack:

providing a parameter to i2c_i801 driver:

modprobe i2c_i801 disable_features=0x2 (i.e. disable the block buffer).

So, from an I2C perspective, there are two things to mention here:

a) I am in the process of extending the I2C core to allow block
transfers > 32 byte. This is a slow process, though, because we need to
pay attention to not break userspace ABI. If this is done *and* the i801
driver supports length > 32 bytes, too, then it would work natively. If
the i801 can do this, this is a question for Jean Delvare.

b) I don't know Elantech HW but there are devices out there which allow
configuration for the block size. Something like a bit specifying if
block transfers > 32 are allowed. Or the SMBus version to support. Block
transfers > 32 are SMBus 3.0+ only. If your HW does not have that,
disabling SMBus is an option, too. Disabling it in the i801 driver is
too much of a hammer, I'd say.

Hope this helps! Happy hacking,

   Wolfram