Input device design (3)

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 02:09:44PM +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > Routing the actual input events through such an external server seems
> > like too much overhead and latency, though I could easily be wrong;
> > perhaps that is after all the best option for input devices, if not
> > for output devices (screens, speakers, readers, braille, etc).
> 
> Introducing the additional context switches doesn't seem worth it.
> 
> It should still be possible to forward remote devices by defining a 
> wire-protocol for that, have a daemon for that forward it to a socket and 
> tell the server to use /dev/myfifo instead of /dev/input/event5. Just like 
> gpm has been providing /dev/gpmdata

Note that there's an uinput driver already that allows userspace to feed
events to the kernel so they end up in /dev/input/event<N>.  I can't say
this is a really clean approach or avoids context switches, but at least
it works out of the box for quite some time.