xorg-server: What's the point of the devd backend?

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

On 21.12.2014 01:54, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> I could understand the direction if kbdmux and sysmouse were on
> their way out, but I'm pretty sure this won't happen, because people
> who use the plain console would be up in arms over it.  So we are
> stuck with this silly situation of two competing auto-attachment
> layers, both enabled by default, one preempting the other.

I agree that kbdmux(4) and moused(8) are a pain from the point of view
of the X.Org server.

One nice advantage of the devd backend is that I can turn on/off
kbdmux(4) or moused(8) without having to migrate the keyboard layout
configuration for instance. Also, I can copy the xorg.conf chunk from
computer to computer. I admit these are rare use cases. But I don't
think the backend add much complexity. And it makes the X.Org server to
behave more like on Linux.

Input device handling on FreeBSD is quite basic and we have a lot of
work in this area to modernize it. The evdev GSoC (which will hit HEAD I
hope) is one step in this direction. We could also improve vt(4) to
handle multiple keyboards.

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron

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