Re: Mainlining of Pyra nub joystick driver

Arnd Bergmann
2016-06-14T15:13:57Z

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 2:45:23 PM CEST Andrey Utkin wrote:
> There's a pair of "nub" devices on Pyra handheld PC
> (https://pyra-handheld.com/), and there's driver for nub, which is going
> to be reworked for upstreaming. While the device itself fits most to
> "joystick" category, the computer itself lacks touchpad and mouse
> buttons, and the existing driver is capable of switching between modes, in
> which it shows up like one of the following:
> - scrolling wheel,
> - mouse buttons set,
> - pointer updating its absolute position (graphic pad alike AFAIU),
> - pointer device behaving like actual joystick / pointing stick.
>
> Currently modes switching happens through r/w file in /proc, which is of
> couse going to be changed.
>
> I wonder if such mode switching mechanism is tolerable for inclusion to
> upstream kernel in this case. I'd like some advice how to rearrange the
> driver to save most of flexibility while matching upstream kernel
> conventions. I am especially interested in comments from subsystem
> maintainers.
>

My best idea for this is that the device driver should just report one
type of device, with the other modes being handled on top of that,
by a generic kernel framework or in user space.

Code for registering the same inputs to all those frameworks doesn't
seem to belong into a driver.

Arnd