Lenovo IdeaPad slidebar driver

[Андрей Моисеев]

Some Lenovo's Ideapad notebooks, my Y550P in particular, have a 1-D
touch panel. Here's how it looks like:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/dFAtu.jpg
I basically figured out how it works and I want to write a driver for it.

The driver doesn't need kernel support, as I can do everything from
userspace (in detail, specific keyboard scancode as touch notification
+ x86 IO calls to get the coordinate). I think that might be an Xorg
input driver.
In Windows, when panel is touched, a vendor-made app selection window
appears, the user selects the app and releases the panel. The panel
_is not_ to act as a mouse or a keyboard or a scroll wheel, in
general. It should produce some custom events for apps that are aware
of the panel. Moreover, the panel has 4 LED blinking modes, which I
should be able to switch at runtime, or at least to configure by some
conf file.
Should I delve deeper into Xorg docs to write the driver, or I'd
better provide a different way for applications to interact with the
panel, not via Xorg?