From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263946AbUEHCf4 (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 22:35:56 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263871AbUEHCfz (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 22:35:55 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:43930 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263946AbUEHCfy (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 22:35:54 -0400 Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 19:35:19 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Tuukka Toivonen Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de, b-gruber@gmx.de, mhakali@telia.com, Vojtech Pavlik Subject: Re: [PATCH] SERIO_USERDEV: direct userspace access to mouse/keyboard psaux serial ports Message-Id: <20040507193519.06062655.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Tuukka Toivonen wrote: > > SERIO_USERDEV - Direct serial input device access for userspace > > This driver provides direct access from usespace into PS/2 (or psaux) > serial ports used usually for input devices such as mouses and keyboards. I must say that last time this went around, the arguments which were made in its favour made sense. Let me recap: At present, the kernel decodes the external device into logical "events" and, if someone wants access to the raw device bitstream the kernel will synthesize that bitstream from the decoded event stream. But if, for example, the kernel doesn't have a decoder for the external device, we're out of luck. And given that the external device generates a stream of bits, the kernel should provide some way for applications to directly access that stream without the intervening interpretation. Is that a decent summary of the situation? If so then yeah, I think the kernel should have a driver which does all of this.