Re: [PATCH 1/1]: input: add support for VirtualBox touchscreen emulation to the Lifebook driver

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

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 09:44:48PM +0100, Michael Thayer wrote:
> Hello Dmitry,
> 
> Le jeudi 25 février 2010 à 02:17 -0800, Dmitry Torokhov a écrit :
> > On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:46:29PM +0100, Michael Thayer wrote:
> > > Le mercredi 24 février 2010 à 02:02 -0800, Dmitry Torokhov a écrit :
> > > > On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 09:55:33PM +0100, Michael Thayer wrote:
> > > > > I'm not sure, if we ended up doing a completely new device, how different it
> > > > > would end up being.  Emulating a touchscreen or a tablet makes sense for us as
> > > > > these are both something known, which will work with existing systems without
> > > > > too much tweaking
> > > > > [snip]
> > > > But the virtual mouse is not a touchscreen or a tablet, it behaves
> > > > differently.
> > > What would you suggest emulating that exists in the real world?
> > 
> > There are not many real devices that have teh same characteristics as
> > virtual mouse generating absolute coordinates. Umm, the closest would be
> > a wacom tablet when used with its own mouse.
> We decided in the end to emulate a USB tablet, as some other virtualisers do.
> It works well out of the box with recent Linux distributions, and while older
> ones recognise it as a touchpad (in fact they use it through /dev/input/mice),

Yes, mousedev will provide workable approximation of standard mouse for
a device that provides absolute events. BTW, the fact that data from a
device is available from /dev/input/mice does not mean that device was
recognized as a mouse, a touchpad or something else. It just means that
kernel is able to approximate device as a standard PS/2 Expolorer mouse.

> it still provides a reasonable user experience until the user has installed our
> guest drivers.

It is your call but I would much rather if you worked on fixeng evdev to
work with your virtual device rather than having to install a new X
driver and going through the hoops trying to detect which one should be
used on a particular box. At least on Linux...

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry