Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Fix qemu keymaps, part one

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 15:18 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 04:01:14PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > qemu carries a bunch of reverse keymaps in pc-bios/keymaps/, to map
> > keysyms it receives from vnc clients back to keycodes.  These
> > keymaps
> > seem to be buggy and incomplete at times.  So, to tackle the issue
> > once
> > for all, I've written a tool to generate those maps from xkb
> > keyboard
> > layout data using libxkbcommon.
> > 
> > This patch series only adds the tool, it doesn't touch the maps in
> > pc-bios/keymaps/ yet.  I want some testing feedback first ...
> 
> Hmm, we recently split out the keymap database and code for
> generating
> lookup tables (that was duplicated across spice-gtk, gtk-vnc, and
> libvirt)
> into a shared git sub-module
> 
>   https://gitlab.com/keycodemap/keycodemapdb/
> 
> some other VNC clients were also switching to its use.
> 
> I was coincidentally working on a patch to get QEMU to use this too,
> so all projects are aligned on the same data maps and thus share
> fixes
> in this area.
> 
> IMHO that'd be preferable than doing something custom in QEMU only.

This is a different issue.  gtk-vnc & friends have to map keycodes from
one system (ps/2, evdev, xorg, ...) to another.  qemu has to map
keysyms back to keycodes, using a reverse keymap, in case the vnc
client doesn't support VNC_ENCODING_EXT_KEY_EVENT.

cheers,
  Gerd