RFC: HAL probing for VMware vmmouse device

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 05:33:33PM -0700, Philip Langdale wrote:

> The mouse appears as a regular PS/2 mouse and detecting that it's the 
> special vmmouse
> a is done completely out of band; we can't change how this works for 
> compatibility reasons
> so I've got to make do.

There's no possibility of it answering an extended PS/2 query? This 
obviously doesn't solve the problem (since it'd need additional kernel 
support and so you're screwed from an existing software point of view 
anyway), but it'd be a cleaner solution going forwards.

> I've attached example fdi and callout script implementations (the 
> vmmouse-detect
> binary that is referred to is debian/ubuntu specific but that can be folded 
> into
> a hald-probe style binary or bundled elsewhere if desired)

Hmm. The fdi seemed to be missing?

> Alternatively it could live outside of hal - possibly with the X11 driver 
> package
> itself, but I'm concerned about how successfully it would be deployed in 
> that situation.

I think shipping it with vmmouse ought to work - distributions are going 
to have to upgrade some component in any case.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org