touch panel support

[Robert Noland]

On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 10:27 +0100, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 00:17:06 +0300
> Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> >   Hello,
> > 
> >   I've got a display with touch panel, and I'd like to get in working
> > in FreeBSD. The touch panel is supported by NetBSD's uep(4). So far,
> > I have written uep(4) for FreeBSD, that successfully reads and parses
> > data from the USB touch panel device.
> > 
> >   And then I've got a problem. Our mouse subsystem is not ready for
> > touch panels. Our mouse(4) protocol does not support mouse driver
> > passing _absolute_ coordinates to the mouse(4) subsystem. It only
> > expects a relative movement of the mouse.  But _absolute_ coordinates
> > are principal idea of any touch panel.
> > 
> >   The lesser problem is lack of generic support for touch panel
> > calibration.
> > 
> >   Both of these problems are solved in NetBSD. They've got a wsmux(4)
> > device, just like our kbdmux(4), but for mice. This mouse multiplexer
> > can also understand absolute coordinates from underlying mice drivers.
> > NetBSD also has a generic support for calibration of touch panels.
> > 
> >   What is the FreeBSD future way to go: port things for NetBSD? Write
> > something different?
> > 
> 
> IMO we should go for porting what NetBSD has.

Well, input device stuff is tricky...  From a console perspective, what
we do now with kbdmux and moused seems like the right thing.  If you
look at X though, we would really like to have independent input
devices, each with its own set of characteristics.  For multi-seat
installations, you basically want to allocate some set of input devices
to each seat.  In other cases, you might want your touchpad to work
independently of your mouse, for example.

I'm not certain what the best way to achieve this is, but our input
layer is currently pretty frustrating to deal with, especially when you
throw HAL or DeviceKit into the mix.  We have to go to a lot of effort
to figure out if mice are using moused or not, and if they should be
advertised to X.

robert.
  
> --
> Gary Jennejohn
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-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD