Re: Supporting 64-bit Digitizer Serial Numbers?

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

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 09:35:33AM +0100, Benjamin Tissoires wrote:
[...]
> > I'm appending a proof-of-concept which implements this; I describe the
> > details below. (This is based on 5.4, but it looks clean for 5.10 as
> > well as relatively straightforward to backport.)
> >
> > I'd appreciate any feedback on this approach.
> >
> > My thought is to perform minimal modifications to allow hid-core to
> > transfer reports up to 64-bits in size to hid-input, so that it can
> > process this field and emit it to the power_supply integration, as well
> > as through classic MSC_SERIAL (for the low 32 bits) and a new
> > MSC_SERIAL2 (the upper bits) for applications which want it inline with
> > stylus event data.
> 
> The wacom driver already has this problem and handles it in a creative
> way (as usual ;-P)
> If I am not mistaken, it splits the 64 bits serial on 2 events as
> well: MSC_SERIAL and ABS_MISC (Jason might correct me here).

ABS_MISC is the tool ID, MSC_SERIAL is the 32-bit serial. Quick check
suggests the upper bits of the 64-bit serial number are simply dropped.
So afaict this situation is still officially unprecedented :)
 
> I am not saying this is what needs to be done, but just what some
> userspace tools already expect.
> 
> >
> > hid_field.value is expanded to an s64 array from s32, and there are
> > a few knock-on effects to code that holds pointers to these fields.
> > No other interfaces, in-kernel, or user-space, are modified to support
> > HID reports/evdev events > 32 bits.
> 
> I also think both problems are orthogonal (which is why you haven't
> tried to change the evdev protocol).
> 
> I don't think we can do much on the evdev side to support 64 bits or
> bigger data.
> Dmitry and Peter might find a good way to work around that, but I'm OK
> with adding MSC_SERIAL_2 from my point of view.

As long as the driver behaves well (i.e. it'll send *both* MSC_SERIAL and
MSC_SERIAL2 in the same frame) it'll be easy to deal with in userspace.

There's some theoretical option to have a special evdev event that works to
combine the values of multiple events (similar to utf8) but I think that's
something to consider when the problem is more wide-spread than a serial
number, it's a bit overkill here.

Cheers,
   Peter