Subject: Mir absolute pointer support?

From: Thomas Hellstrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 11:26:54 +0200

Hi!

I'm putting together a VMMouse driver for the linux kernel. In the
preferred mode, the mouse driver sends absolute XY position events: The
idea behind the VMMouse is to be able to use the host cursor to avoid
cursor lag, and then we need to explicitly specify the cursor position
to the guest Virtual Machine.

The idea with a kernel driver is twofold:
1) To be able to run Xorg rootless
2) To enable vmmouse functionality on Mir and Wayland.

The mouse actually shows up as two input devices. One sending only
relative movement events and wheel events, one sending only absolute
position events. The idea is that the display server binds to both input
devices and multiplexes the events, although relative movement events
are very rarely used.

This works fine with Xorg and XMir. The Xorg evdev driver recognizes the
absolute device as a touchscreen and the relative device as a mouse.

However, when I run the Mir demos, it's obvious that no events reach Mir
from the absolute input device. Only mouse wheel motion that is sent
through the relative device.

Before I file a bug, I'd like to know whether absolute pointers are not
supported by Mir yet or if there's some other kind of filtering going on
(for example both the relative and absolute input devices share the same
name and vendor etc.)

Thanks,
Thomas

---

From: Daniel van Vugt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 17:33:05 +0800

Thomas,

Yes, log a bug please.

All evdev motion should work (eventually) to some usable extent. 
Although I have observed some laptop touchpads simply don't work (e.g. 
in the presence of a TrackPoint). Sounds like the same kind of issue. We 
do need to revisit Mir's range of motion device support and it would be 
useful to start documenting which devices need work.

- Daniel

---

From: Daniel van Vugt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 17:40:54 +0800

It's worth noting Android-x86 seems to have the same input bugs, because 
it's the same input code :)

But for Ubuntu we do eventually need better pointing device support than 
Android provides right now.

---

From: Robert Carr <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 09:51:56 -0700

I think Mir should support these kind of relative devices. We have code to
support them as a pointer (e.g. we do have some support for non touch
screen absolute input devices). I think filing a bug is appropriate and we
can dig deeper!

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Thomas Hellstrom <[email-masked]>
wrote:

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