Re: [PATCH] macintosh: move mac_hid driver to input/mouse.

From: Michal SuchÃnek
Date: Wed May 10 2017 - 06:45:05 EST


On 2017-05-10 02:43, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
Hi Michal,

On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 09:14:18PM +0200, Michal Suchanek wrote:
There is nothing mac-specific about this driver. Non-mac hardware with
suboptimal built-in pointer devices exists.

This makes it possible to use this emulation not only on x86 and ppc
notebooks but also on arm and mips.

I'd rather we did not promote from drivers/macintosh to other platforms,
but rather removed it. The same functionality can be done from
userspace.

Why do we even have drivers/input? What in there cannot be done in userspace? We can just remove everything but uinput, right?


What hardware do you believe would benefit from this and why?

Many notebooks have built-in touchpad that has only two buttons, no or limited multitouch and is not built in a way that allows pressing both buttons together to trigger the X11 middle button emulation.

This is a facility that exists in the kernel already and allows mapping the missing button(s) to keys near the touchpad. Easy, works with anything that uses the Linux input events (ie does not depend on X11).

Thanks

Michal