VMMouse ------- The VMMouse driver enables support for the special VMMouse protocol that is provided by VMware virtual machines to give absolute pointer positioning. Installing the driver will improve the user experience when using the mouse to interact with the guest operating system. In particular, use of the driver improves mouse "lag", provides mouse speed and acceleration consistent with the user's host operating system, and enables the auto-grab/ungrab feature in VMware products without requiring the VMware toolbox application. Using the driver ---------------- Assuming you have built and installed the driver in the standard way for autotools based packages (see INSTALL), or the driver was already installed by your distro, using it is simply a matter of changing the driver used for the mouse input device from "mouse" to "vmmouse". The vmmouse driver is capable of falling back to the standard "mouse" driver if a VMware virtual machine is not detected. This allows for dual-booting of an operating system from a virtual machine to real hardware without having to edit xorg.conf every time. Implementation -------------- The following is not necessary reading for anyone who wants to use the driver, but should help anyone who wants to understand how it works or who wants to write a driver for a different target, whether it's another operating system, a linux kernel input driver or even gpm. The driver is composed of three different layers: 1) The vmmouse protocol layer (vmmouse_proto.[c|h]) - This provides the call to read and write the port over which the vmmouse packets are transfered. 2) The vmmouse client layer (vmmouse_client.[c|h]) - This builds on top of the protocol layer to provide higher level calls for enabling/disabling the vmmouse mechanism and for reading data. - A new driver for a different target would use this interface. 3) The Xorg vmmouse driver (vmmouse.c) - This is the actual Xorg specific part of the driver. - Note that interrupts indicating the presence of mouse data are still transmitted on the PS/2 port so it is necessary to be set up to receive those interrupts like a standard PS/2 driver, but the actual data on the PS/2 port is ignored. vmmouse_detect -------------- A simple program to detect whether the vmmouse device is present. It is used by the HAL callout script to automatically detect a vmmouse device. Returns 0 if we are running in a virtual machine where the vmmouse device is present. Returns 1 otherwise (either we are not in a VM or the vmmouse device was disabled).