Laptop Mouse Driver — [new]

We benchmarked three laptop drivers (Windows Precision Touchpad, Synaptics legacy, and a Linux libinput configuration) on identical hardware.

The "smart" Synaptics driver with advanced gesture smoothing burned CPU and battery, while the simpler libinput driver performed better but offered fewer palm rejection tunings. laptop mouse driver

We propose re-architecting the laptop mouse driver into three isolated components: It is a :

| Metric | Precision (Win) | Synaptics (Legacy) | libinput (Linux) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | CPU usage (idle, finger resting) | 0.3% | 1.1% | 0.1% | | CPU usage (continuous two-finger scroll) | 2.4% | 5.8% | 1.2% | | Wake-ups per second (no movement) | 12 | 380 | 4 | | Gesture recognition latency (ms) | 18 | 42 | 23 | | Security vulnerabilities (CVEs, 2022–2025) | 6 | 19 | 2 | laptop mouse driver

The central thesis of this paper is that the laptop mouse driver is no longer a "driver" in the classic sense. It is a :