Re: behaviour change for keyboards introduced by "HID: generic: create one input report per application type"

[Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer@who-t.net>]

Hi Siarhei,

On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 01:02:03PM -0700, Siarhei Vishniakou wrote:
> Hello linux-input,
> 
> We have noticed a recent behavior change introduced by the commit:
> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f07b3c1da92db108662f99417a212fc1eddc44d1
> HID: generic: create one input report per application type.
> 
> We have been looking into the behaviour of the Microsoft Designer
> keyboard. Prior to these patches, the keyboard would report as a
> single input_device to the user space. After these patches, the
> keyboard is now split into 2 input devices: “Designer Keyboard
> Consumer Control” and “"Designer Keyboard Keyboard". We noticed that
> this behavior also applies to the keyboard Dell KB216. In the Dell
> case, it is split into 3 devices, which include “Consumer Control”
> (for some of the media keys) and “System Control” (for the sleep
> button).
> 
> In both Microsoft and Dell cases, these are pretty standard keyboards,
> although they do contain media keys and power/sleep keys.
> 
> Could you please confirm that this new behaviour is indeed
> intentional, and that you wanted keyboards to be split in this
> fashion?

Is there an actual issue with the split though or just a cosmetic one? This
is pretty standard for many keyboards (and other devices) but it shouldn't
have any negative effect on functionality.

Cheers,
   Peter