Re: Touchpad toggle mess

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

Hi Bastien,

On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 12:00:09AM +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> In GNOME 2.32, we added support for touchpad toggle buttons, by
> capturing the XF86TouchpadToggle button in gnome-settings-daemon,
> showing a nice popup, and disabling the touchpad in software.
> 
> That works great for a number of laptops, but completely breaks a number
> of others where the hardware handles the request, but still sends a key
> event (usually separate ones for on and off). In those cases, we'd need
> 2 more key types, in the kernel, and in X.org.

Rfkill story all over I guess ;(

> 
> The patches in https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31300
> implement this for the kernel, and for X.org.
> 
> Then we have the problem that udev's keymaps seem to use different
> function keys depending on the hardware [1], when X.org (because of the
> limitations of XKB) standardised on F22 for "XF86TouchpadToggle".
> 
> So we'll need to standardise on the keys used. I selected F21 for
> XF86TouchpadToggle, F22 for XF86TouchpadOn and F23 for XF86TouchpadOff.
> See the patch in:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31333
> 
> The remaining fixes would need to be in udev's keymaps, to set hardware
> handled keys to F22 and F23, and software ones to F21. Patch is attached
> for that.
> 
> Questions, comments?

I still believe we need dedicated keycodes in kernel for that and make
sure that in-kernel maps use proper keycodes so that programs that do
not have the same limitations that X has could differentiate between
touchpad events and real F2* events. X can still continue to use f21, 22
and 23 (at least while it can't handle higher keycodes), and common
setups may rely on udev's facilities to remap the keys.

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry