Yup: in the DU case, I hid all this sort of mess in the device driver.
Putting such messes in the device driver makes a certain amount of sense,
as you have to have something to get the system off the ground in the
first place to interface with fully cooked terminal drivers. I don't
know how braindead pc keyboards are, but guarantee that Digital was able
to have some pretty wierd keyboards (not as bad as some I heard of in the
industry 10 years ago: some were completely incapable of doing both
down and up events, and there was opposition to this requirement by
X's design; most apps don't care, but a few care alot, so some people
just plain got to lose for certain apps.).
This could be done differently without device driver changes, by a different
implementation of the OS specific section of the X server. The X server
internal design is quite good at such things: we had to support a ton
of different operating systems/keyboards/displays. XFree86 4.0 goes
to a modular server at long last: I dunno if the OS interface piece is
a module or not, however. And some more work will be needed in this
area to deal with USB properly.
-- Jim Gettys Technology and Corporate Development Compaq Computer Corporation jg@pa.dec.com
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/