Input device design (3)

[Waldo Bastian]

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 08:56, James Cloos wrote:
> BTW, just to be clear, I (at least) wasn't thinking of having the
> actual i/o events go through this os-dependant, external server,
> but rather just the initial discovery and hotplugging of i/o devices.
>
> I was expecting the external server to notify the X server of the
> locations of the devices.  Ie, on Linux it could tell the X server
> that /dev/input/event5 just appeared, is a pointer, and should join
> the set of core pointers.  Or that eg /dev/input/event2 went away
> and should be close(2)ed.  Et cetera.

Yes, that is my thinking as well.

> Routing the actual input events through such an external server seems
> like too much overhead and latency, though I could easily be wrong;
> perhaps that is after all the best option for input devices, if not
> for output devices (screens, speakers, readers, braille, etc).

Introducing the additional context switches doesn't seem worth it.

It should still be possible to forward remote devices by defining a 
wire-protocol for that, have a daemon for that forward it to a socket and 
tell the server to use /dev/myfifo instead of /dev/input/event5. Just like 
gpm has been providing /dev/gpmdata

Cheers,
Waldo

> Someone should test it out and see how well -- or not -- it works in
> practice.
>
> -JimC

-- 
Linux Client Architect - Channel Software Operation - Intel Corporation