hid-sensor-custom: async notification for input-report sysfs attributes? (human presence / attention sensors)

[Daniel Paul Perinchery]

Hi,

I've been investigating why userspace can't efficiently watch a
hid-sensor-custom input-report value (specifically a human-presence
sensor, HID usage 2000e1, on an AMD Sensor Fusion Hub / amd_sfh
platform) for changes without polling, and wanted to check whether
there's interest in closing this gap before I try to write anything.

Setup: Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5 14AKP10, AMD Ryzen AI 7 350, kernel 7.0.13
(Debian/Parrot, but this is stock hid-sensor-custom.c). Presence and
gaze/attention are exposed as separate logical sensors under the same
physical hub (HID-SENSOR-2000e1.x.auto), each with the usual
auto-generated input-N-<usage>-value sysfs attribute.

What I found tracing show_value() in hid-sensor-custom.c: for input
reports, it calls sensor_hub_input_attr_get_raw_value(..., report_id,
SENSOR_HUB_SYNC, false) -- i.e. every read of the -value file issues a
synchronous GET_REPORT to the hub and returns the live answer. There's
no cached field backing that attribute, so there's nothing for a
notify-on-change mechanism to attach to on that path.

Separately, hid_sensor_capture_sample() *is* a genuine async callback
fired on hub-pushed input reports, but as far as I can tell it only
feeds the raw kfifo behind the driver's misc-device streaming
interface (custom_dev), gated on test_bit(0,
&sensor_inst->misc_opened). It doesn't appear to update any per-field
cached value, so it isn't reachable from the sysfs show_value() path
either.

Net effect: there's no way for a userspace consumer to poll()/
select() on the -value file and be woken only on real hardware events.
The hub itself is already configured for threshold-based reporting
(property-reporting-state = 2, i.e. "Threshold Events") in my case, so
the inefficiency is entirely on the kernel/sysfs side -- userspace has
to fall back to timed re-reads of a synchronous, firmware-round-trip
attribute, which is more expensive per-read than a typical cached
sysfs value and awkward to size a safe polling interval for.

This seems like a real gap for the presence/proximity use case
specifically (walk-away lock, auto-dim, etc.), which is inherently
event-oriented and is exactly the kind of feature vendors implement
natively on Windows via push notifications from the same class of
sensor.

Before I put together a patch I wanted to ask: is there interest in
adding async caching + sysfs_notify() (or sysfs_notify_dirent(), if
attrs end up carrying a stored kernfs_node) for input-report values
specifically, sourced from hid_sensor_capture_sample()'s existing
async path? Rough shape as I see it:

  - add a cached "last input value" (+ a bool "valid") per relevant
field in struct hid_sensor_custom_field
  - in hid_sensor_capture_sample(), in addition to (or instead of,
behind a config/attr) feeding the misc-device fifo, decode and store
the value for the matching field, then sysfs_notify() its -value
attribute
  - leave show_value()'s SENSOR_HUB_SYNC path untouched for feature
reports and for any input attrs that never get an async report, so
nothing regresses for existing consumers

Happy to be told this already exists via a different interface I've
missed (I did look at whether this should just go through the IIO
buffered/trigger interface instead, given some other hid-sensor-*
drivers are IIO-backed -- but hid-sensor-custom exposes vendor/custom
usages directly via this sysfs shape rather than IIO channels, so I
wasn't sure that's the right layer to add it at). Also open to being
told the misc-device/fifo interface is meant to be the async
consumption path already and userspace tools should be using that
instead of polling -value -- if so, is there existing tooling/docs for
that path I should be pointing presence-detection use cases at?

Not attaching a patch yet since I'd rather get a read on the right
approach (and whether it's wanted at all) before writing one.

Thanks,
Daniel Paul