Ah, I see now that there are several points at which it could return
early and not reach the ABS_TOOL_WIDTH code.

I tried out your little patch to force the width to be reported and
captured evtest output during a session of normal computer use. First, I
noticed that still the width was not always reported, though it seemed
to be reported most often when I brushed my palm against the pad.
Secondly, I wanted to test the claim that it is not meaningful to report
pressure and width simultaneously so I parsed out the (width, pressure)
pairs from evtest and plotted them. While there is a positive
correlation between the two, it is definitely possible to have low
pressure/high width touches and vice versa.

Here are my data if you are curious:
https://gist.github.com/silverhammermba/43abb0fde7b17d557d2b

>From what I've read about the kernel multitouch protocol, the claim from
your previous link that "ABS_MT_PRESSURE and ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR are
normally mutually exclusive" only makes sense if the tool width (i.e.
ABS_MT_WIDTH_MAJOR) is being reported. In that case the pressure should
be equivalent to the ratio of TOUCH_MAJOR to WIDTH_MAJOR and it would
not make sense for a device to report both. Thus there are two
acceptable situations for a device that claims to report tool width:
report tool width and pressure or report tool width and touch width.

The second problem - the palm detection code not working without width -
seems like it could be more generally useful if there are touchpads that
only report pressure. However I don't see that as the issue here since
it seems clear that my touchpad *can* report width.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1245328

Title:
  Synaptics kernel driver does not report finger width information,
  breaking usermode driver's palm detection

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