Input device design (3)

[Russell Shaw]

Olivier Galibert wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 02:45:07AM +1000, Russell Shaw wrote:
> 
>>  The X server could monitor a special device such as /dev/sysconfig or
>>  a known ip address or socket so that if the user was to unplug/plug
>>  mice, keyboards, or any other hardware, the kernel or user-space
>>  programs or a daemon could write notification messages to it.
> 
> Sounds weird.  You'd like to have in the X server all the
> system-dependant code to be able to read the state of the input
> devices, but not the code to be notified of their existence?  Strange.
> 
> It's unclear to me what your problem is, exactly.  Is it
> getting/handling hotplug events, or is it the routing decisions (as is
> this mouse goes to this server only, or this keyboard uses this
> keymap) ?  These are two different and somewhat orthogonal problems.

If the X server was listening to a well known unix socket, the
messages written to that point by anything in the system would
need to be in a special format the X server understands.

That makes the X server independant of platform specifics. There
would need to be messages for screen size and scan rates etc, which
are pretty generic parameters common to most hardware. Does that
satisfy?