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- Linux Input drivers v1.0
- (c) 1999-2001 Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@ucw.cz>
- Sponsored by SuSE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-0. Disclaimer
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
-under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
-Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
-any later version.
-
- This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
-WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
-or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
-more details.
-
- You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
-with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59
-Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
-
- Should you need to contact me, the author, you can do so either by e-mail
-- mail your message to <vojtech@ucw.cz>, or by paper mail: Vojtech Pavlik,
-Simunkova 1594, Prague 8, 182 00 Czech Republic
-
- For your convenience, the GNU General Public License version 2 is included
-in the package: See the file COPYING.
-
-1. Introduction
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- This is a collection of drivers that is designed to support all input
-devices under Linux. While it is currently used only on for USB input
-devices, future use (say 2.5/2.6) is expected to expand to replace
-most of the existing input system, which is why it lives in
-drivers/input/ instead of drivers/usb/.
-
- The centre of the input drivers is the input module, which must be
-loaded before any other of the input modules - it serves as a way of
-communication between two groups of modules:
-
-1.1 Device drivers
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- These modules talk to the hardware (for example via USB), and provide
-events (keystrokes, mouse movements) to the input module.
-
-1.2 Event handlers
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- These modules get events from input and pass them where needed via
-various interfaces - keystrokes to the kernel, mouse movements via a
-simulated PS/2 interface to GPM and X and so on.
-
-2. Simple Usage
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- For the most usual configuration, with one USB mouse and one USB keyboard,
-you'll have to load the following modules (or have them built in to the
-kernel):
-
- input
- mousedev
- keybdev
- usbcore
- uhci_hcd or ohci_hcd or ehci_hcd
- usbhid
-
- After this, the USB keyboard will work straight away, and the USB mouse
-will be available as a character device on major 13, minor 63:
-
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 63 Mar 28 22:45 mice
-
- This device has to be created.
- The commands to create it by hand are:
-
- cd /dev
- mkdir input
- mknod input/mice c 13 63
-
- After that you have to point GPM (the textmode mouse cut&paste tool) and
-XFree to this device to use it - GPM should be called like:
-
- gpm -t ps2 -m /dev/input/mice
-
- And in X:
-
- Section "Pointer"
- Protocol "ImPS/2"
- Device "/dev/input/mice"
- ZAxisMapping 4 5
- EndSection
-
- When you do all of the above, you can use your USB mouse and keyboard.
-
-3. Detailed Description
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-3.1 Device drivers
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Device drivers are the modules that generate events. The events are
-however not useful without being handled, so you also will need to use some
-of the modules from section 3.2.
-
-3.1.1 usbhid
-~~~~~~~~~~~~
- usbhid is the largest and most complex driver of the whole suite. It
-handles all HID devices, and because there is a very wide variety of them,
-and because the USB HID specification isn't simple, it needs to be this big.
-
- Currently, it handles USB mice, joysticks, gamepads, steering wheels
-keyboards, trackballs and digitizers.
-
- However, USB uses HID also for monitor controls, speaker controls, UPSs,
-LCDs and many other purposes.
-
- The monitor and speaker controls should be easy to add to the hid/input
-interface, but for the UPSs and LCDs it doesn't make much sense. For this,
-the hiddev interface was designed. See Documentation/hid/hiddev.txt
-for more information about it.
-
- The usage of the usbhid module is very simple, it takes no parameters,
-detects everything automatically and when a HID device is inserted, it
-detects it appropriately.
-
- However, because the devices vary wildly, you might happen to have a
-device that doesn't work well. In that case #define DEBUG at the beginning
-of hid-core.c and send me the syslog traces.
-
-3.1.2 usbmouse
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- For embedded systems, for mice with broken HID descriptors and just any
-other use when the big usbhid wouldn't be a good choice, there is the
-usbmouse driver. It handles USB mice only. It uses a simpler HIDBP
-protocol. This also means the mice must support this simpler protocol. Not
-all do. If you don't have any strong reason to use this module, use usbhid
-instead.
-
-3.1.3 usbkbd
-~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Much like usbmouse, this module talks to keyboards with a simplified
-HIDBP protocol. It's smaller, but doesn't support any extra special keys.
-Use usbhid instead if there isn't any special reason to use this.
-
-3.1.4 wacom
-~~~~~~~~~~~
- This is a driver for Wacom Graphire and Intuos tablets. Not for Wacom
-PenPartner, that one is handled by the HID driver. Although the Intuos and
-Graphire tablets claim that they are HID tablets as well, they are not and
-thus need this specific driver.
-
-3.1.5 iforce
-~~~~~~~~~~~~
- A driver for I-Force joysticks and wheels, both over USB and RS232.
-It includes ForceFeedback support now, even though Immersion
-Corp. considers the protocol a trade secret and won't disclose a word
-about it.
-
-3.2 Event handlers
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Event handlers distribute the events from the devices to userland and
-kernel, as needed.
-
-3.2.1 keybdev
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- keybdev is currently a rather ugly hack that translates the input
-events into architecture-specific keyboard raw mode (Xlated AT Set2 on
-x86), and passes them into the handle_scancode function of the
-keyboard.c module. This works well enough on all architectures that
-keybdev can generate rawmode on, other architectures can be added to
-it.
-
- The right way would be to pass the events to keyboard.c directly,
-best if keyboard.c would itself be an event handler. This is done in
-the input patch, available on the webpage mentioned below.
-
-3.2.2 mousedev
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- mousedev is also a hack to make programs that use mouse input
-work. It takes events from either mice or digitizers/tablets and makes
-a PS/2-style (a la /dev/psaux) mouse device available to the
-userland. Ideally, the programs could use a more reasonable interface,
-for example evdev
-
- Mousedev devices in /dev/input (as shown above) are:
-
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 32 Mar 28 22:45 mouse0
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 33 Mar 29 00:41 mouse1
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 34 Mar 29 00:41 mouse2
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 35 Apr 1 10:50 mouse3
- ...
- ...
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 62 Apr 1 10:50 mouse30
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 63 Apr 1 10:50 mice
-
-Each 'mouse' device is assigned to a single mouse or digitizer, except
-the last one - 'mice'. This single character device is shared by all
-mice and digitizers, and even if none are connected, the device is
-present. This is useful for hotplugging USB mice, so that programs
-can open the device even when no mice are present.
-
- CONFIG_INPUT_MOUSEDEV_SCREEN_[XY] in the kernel configuration are
-the size of your screen (in pixels) in XFree86. This is needed if you
-want to use your digitizer in X, because its movement is sent to X
-via a virtual PS/2 mouse and thus needs to be scaled
-accordingly. These values won't be used if you use a mouse only.
-
- Mousedev will generate either PS/2, ImPS/2 (Microsoft IntelliMouse) or
-ExplorerPS/2 (IntelliMouse Explorer) protocols, depending on what the
-program reading the data wishes. You can set GPM and X to any of
-these. You'll need ImPS/2 if you want to make use of a wheel on a USB
-mouse and ExplorerPS/2 if you want to use extra (up to 5) buttons.
-
-3.2.3 joydev
-~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Joydev implements v0.x and v1.x Linux joystick api, much like
-drivers/char/joystick/joystick.c used to in earlier versions. See
-joystick-api.txt in the Documentation subdirectory for details. As
-soon as any joystick is connected, it can be accessed in /dev/input
-on:
-
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 0 Apr 1 10:50 js0
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 1 Apr 1 10:50 js1
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 2 Apr 1 10:50 js2
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 3 Apr 1 10:50 js3
- ...
-
-And so on up to js31.
-
-3.2.4 evdev
-~~~~~~~~~~~
- evdev is the generic input event interface. It passes the events
-generated in the kernel straight to the program, with timestamps. The
-API is still evolving, but should be usable now. It's described in
-section 5.
-
- This should be the way for GPM and X to get keyboard and mouse
-events. It allows for multihead in X without any specific multihead
-kernel support. The event codes are the same on all architectures and
-are hardware independent.
-
- The devices are in /dev/input:
-
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 64 Apr 1 10:49 event0
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 65 Apr 1 10:50 event1
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 66 Apr 1 10:50 event2
- crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 67 Apr 1 10:50 event3
- ...
-
-And so on up to event31.
-
-4. Verifying if it works
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Typing a couple keys on the keyboard should be enough to check that
-a USB keyboard works and is correctly connected to the kernel keyboard
-driver.
-
- Doing a "cat /dev/input/mouse0" (c, 13, 32) will verify that a mouse
-is also emulated; characters should appear if you move it.
-
- You can test the joystick emulation with the 'jstest' utility,
-available in the joystick package (see Documentation/input/joystick.txt).
-
- You can test the event devices with the 'evtest' utility available
-in the LinuxConsole project CVS archive (see the URL below).
-
-5. Event interface
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Should you want to add event device support into any application (X, gpm,
-svgalib ...) I <vojtech@ucw.cz> will be happy to provide you any help I
-can. Here goes a description of the current state of things, which is going
-to be extended, but not changed incompatibly as time goes:
-
- You can use blocking and nonblocking reads, also select() on the
-/dev/input/eventX devices, and you'll always get a whole number of input
-events on a read. Their layout is:
-
-struct input_event {
- struct timeval time;
- unsigned short type;
- unsigned short code;
- unsigned int value;
-};
-
- 'time' is the timestamp, it returns the time at which the event happened.
-Type is for example EV_REL for relative moment, EV_KEY for a keypress or
-release. More types are defined in include/uapi/linux/input-event-codes.h.
-
- 'code' is event code, for example REL_X or KEY_BACKSPACE, again a complete
-list is in include/uapi/linux/input-event-codes.h.
-
- 'value' is the value the event carries. Either a relative change for
-EV_REL, absolute new value for EV_ABS (joysticks ...), or 0 for EV_KEY for
-release, 1 for keypress and 2 for autorepeat.
-