[PATCH 1/1] platform/x86/tuxedo: Add virtual LampArray for TUXEDO NB04 devices

[Benjamin Tissoires]

On Oct 01 2024, Werner Sembach wrote:
> Hi Armin,
> 
> Am 01.10.24 um 18:45 schrieb Armin Wolf:
[...snipped...]
> > Why not having a simple led driver for HID LampArray devices which exposes the
> > whole LampArray as a single LED?
> Yes that is my plan, but see my last reply to Benjamin, it might not be
> trivial as different leds in the same LampArray might have different max
> values for red, green, blue, and intensity. And the LampArray spec even
> allows to mix RGB and non-RGB leds.
> > 
> > If userspace wants to have direct control over the underlying LampArray device,
> > it just needs to unbind the default driver (maybe udev can be useful here?).
> There was something in the last discussion why this might not work, but i
> can't put my finger on it.

We recently have the exact same problem, so it's still fresh in my
memory. And here are what is happening:
- you can unbind the driver with a sysfs command for sure
- but then the device is not attached to a driver so HID core doesn't
  expose the hidraw node
- you'd think "we can just rebind it to hid-generic", but that doesn't
  work because hid-generic sees that there is already a loaded driver
  that can handle the device and it'll reject itself because it gives
  priority over the other driver
- what works is that you might be able to unload the other driver, but
  if it's already used by something else (like hid-multitouch), you
  don't want to do that. And also if you unload that driver, whenever
  the driver gets re-inserted, hid-generic will unbind itself, so back
  to square one

So unless we find a way to forward the "manual" binding to hid-generic,
and/or we can also quirk the device with
HID_QUIRK_IGNORE_SPECIAL_DRIVER[0] just unbinding the device doesn't
work.

Cheers,
Benjamin

PS: brain fart:
if HID LampArray support (whatever the implementation, through Pavel's
new API or simple LED emulation) is in hid-input, we can also simply add
a new HID quirk to enable this or not, and use that quirk dynamically
(yes, with BPF :-P ) to rebind the device...

[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-input/20241001-hid-bpf-hid-generic-v3-0-2ef1019468df@kernel.org/T/#t