Re: SERIO_USERDEV patch for 2.6

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 11:16:31AM -0500, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:

> Well, my argument is that we only have immediate need for raw access to 
> PC-style AUX ports because of wide variety of connected devices. Serial
> ports have other historical means of accessing them, busmice ports have
> well known devices attached.

Busmice don't even have a byte-oriented protocol, so they're not
relevant here, and indeed for serial ports we can use ttyS.

Now there are a few drivers for the KBD/AUX interface that are not
i8042-based - most drivers in the serio directory. Those all would need
to be patched for enabling raw mode.

> Once we have sysfs integration in place I imagine we will be able to
> implement dynamic binding of serio drivers and ports, atkbd and psmouse
> being default ones and user will be able to rebind a specific port to
> let's say serio-raw or some other driver that does not have automatic
> hardware detection yet.

If we can do that reasonably easily via sysfs, then I'm all for that
route.

> But in the meantime marking several ports raw will allow most of the users
> use old means of communicating with their pointing devices without too
> much effort.

It'd be good to find out what devices we don't support yet (I know of
ALPS, which we have a patch pending for and IBM TouchPoints), too. 

As an interim solution, your patch plus a simple serio->userspace driver
would work, too.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs, SuSE CR