RFC: HAL probing for VMware vmmouse device

[Philip Langdale]

Hi all,

I've finally found some time to investigate how to sort out how our (VMware's) mouse
devices need to work with input hotplugging.

Our virtual usb mouse works fine with Xserver 1.5 and evdev 2.0.6 and input hotplug works
correctly - the catch is purely on our end where we don't know when to connect the
mouse device. We can't be indiscriminate because older versions of evdev handle it
incorrectly, making it unusable.

Our special PS/2 device, on the other hand, is in a bad state. There's an outstanding
bug that prevents it working at all with Xserver 1.5 which I'll be checking a fix in
for later today, but the larger question that I want to raise is how to hotplug it
correctly.

The mouse appears as a regular PS/2 mouse and detecting that it's the special vmmouse
a is done completely out of band; we can't change how this works for compatibility reasons
so I've got to make do.

I'd like to get some input on the best way to handle this and on where this code
should live.

I've attached example fdi and callout script implementations (the vmmouse-detect
binary that is referred to is debian/ubuntu specific but that can be folded into
a hald-probe style binary or bundled elsewhere if desired)

So, one option is to write hald-probe-vmmouse and include it with the main hal package.
In that case, it would not actually set input.x11_driver, but some more generic
property and then the x11-input fdi would check that property to set x11_driver.

Alternatively it could live outside of hal - possibly with the X11 driver package
itself, but I'm concerned about how successfully it would be deployed in that situation.

Any thoughts or suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks!

--phil
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