Kernels, Chromebooks, and Touchpads (oh my!)

I have a perfectly functioning Toshiba Chromebook 2 ruing Ubuntu 15.10 under the 4.1.2-040102-generic keel. Everything that often does not work on a Chromebook works: sound; keyboard; screen; networking; and touchpad. But to use the (truly awesome) Systemback app, I need AUFS support. The mainline keel I'm using doesn't have it. And the "stable" keels, which do have AUFS support, somehow kill my touchpad when I boot into them.

It seems to be the case that the keel forces the synaptics driver to not load. When I type

synclient

Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded.

I tried the suggestion here, to add this line to grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i8042.nomux=1 locale=fr_FR i8042.reset"

Optimally, I could fix the touchpad issue so that it works with different keels. The alteative, which I am exploring now, is adding AUFS support to a keel. We'll see which one gets fixed first....