touchscreens in multiscreen setups

[Peter Hutterer]

late reply, but better than never I suppose...

On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 03:23:39PM +0200, Peter Korsgaard wrote:
> How are touchscreens in multiscreen setups supposed to work nowadays?
> The issue with touchscreens is that their input events have to be
> transformed according to configuration of the screen they are
> physically connected to.
> 
> For a concrete example, I have a dual screen setup with nextwindow USB
> (HID) touchscreens. This used to work nicely with the evtouch driver,
> where you could configure each touchscreen to bind to a specific
> screen number in xorg.conf, which evtouch would then use to deliver
> the input events transformed to that screen.
> 
> Now, with xrandr instead of Xinerama there is only one screen and the
> above doesn't work (the coordinates gets scaled to the entire screen
> instead of the individual outputs).
> 
> What is the suggested solution for this? Add randr output tracking to
> evtouch or should evdev handle this instead?

there's two parts to it:
- xf86InputSetScreen seems broken, this should be fixed in the server.
  though it's probably optimised for the Xinerama scenario, I think it
  should be possible to set it up for randr output or CRTC tracking in a
  similar manner.
- randr notification. with screens being added and removed, there's no
  driver interface that I know of that input drivers can use to get notified
  about this stuff. Obviously the simple thing to do would be to handle this
  stuff in the server - if a screen goes away the device defaults back to
  whatever screen is still there. this would be without the driver knowing
  though - not ideal.

I don't think either is a particularly large undertaking, so it's worth
tackling if you have the hardware and the test setups to actually do it.

Keith, any comments to either one?

Cheers,
  Peter