Re: [PATCH 2/2] input: mt: Document the MT event slot protocol (rev3)

[Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 04:52:29PM -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 19:47 +0200, Henrik Rydberg wrote:
> > Chase Douglas wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 12:38 +0200, Henrik Rydberg wrote:
> > >> Getting serious, it is anyone's guess what will happen next, but I was picturing
> > >> a table, with a large multitouch screen and buttons along the side of the table.
> > >> Sure, we can do "ABS_BTN_0", "ABS_BTN_1", etc, but with slots in place, it seems
> > >> more natural to use something like "ABS_MT_BTN_X". While at it, REL_MT event
> > >> makes sense for those touchscreen techniques which register changes, like
> > >> acoustic pulse recognition.
> > 
> > s/ABS/KEY/
> > 
> > > 
> > > Shouldn't this be handled in userspace? I don't think we want to be
> > > quirking drivers for instances where the same touchscreen is overlaid on
> > > buttons in some cases, but not in others. If we don't quirk, we'd need
> > > some mechanism to tell the driver about such buttons.
> > 
> > Perhaps you would like to clarify what "this" means here, and how you arrive at
> > quirking drivers.
> 
> I'm arriving rather late to the conversation, so this could be a matter
> of me not understanding everything. What I thought you were proposing is
> something like what I have on my Nexus One: an MT area encompassing a
> touchscreen and extending to an area of four "buttons" off the bottom of
> the screen. I was thinking that interactions with these buttons would
> trigger the KEY_MT_BTN events you mentioned. However, if thats the case
> then the driver needs to know of these buttons, so we've gone from a
> dumb touchscreen driver to a driver that must be aware of regions of the
> screen where there are buttons. This is where I think it would be better
> to have a userspace application (X?) understand the properties of the
> screen to know exactly what a touch means, instead of trying to
> interpret it inside the kernel.
> 

Even if kernel driver would be doing the "key" decoding then you would
not need KEY_MT_BTN - input layer will happily handle several keys
pressed at once, so the driver would just emit KEY_WWW, KEY_HOMEPAGE,
KEY_CANCEL, etc, etc. No need to bring in MT protocol here.

-- 
Dmitry