Subject: Re: L68K: Double take

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 21:50:31 +0100 (BST)

Geert Uytterhoeven writes:
> >> > live in linux/arch/arm/drivers.  This is all well and good for
> >> > ARM-specific like the keyboard driver, but I think an awful
> >> 
> >> Well I tend to disagree here, since what you do in the keyboard driver
> >> is more or less the same as everybody else do in their keyboard
> >> driver. Of course there is some stuff that relates to the low-level
> >> interfacing of your keyboard, but the rest of the mid/upper-level
> >> handling is generic. In fact Geert already changed the keyboard
> >> drivers into using an upper level and a low-level interface.
> >
> >Yes, we have a split-level keyboard driver on the ARM as well.  If
> >somebody is prepared to do the work to unify all the high-level code so
> >that only the low-level stuff needs to be seperate, then that would be
> >good.  But in that case, you should _definitely_ keep the low-level
> 
> Our split keyboard driver was supposed to be ported to SPARC too, but I haven't
> heard anything from the guy who promised to do it.

Does this split keyboard driver that you have capable of handling
non-autorepeating keyboards?

My split driver can have either a PS2 keyboard or an ARM-specific keyboard
attached by slotting in the relevent low-level driver.  Although they both
totally different (in that one autorepeats, and one does not), my upper
interface is exactly the same, and and will provide the same keycodes to
the X server even.

I have done the same with the mouse driver as well.  I have adopted a
standard interface that does not depend on the hardware that's being
used - whether the mouse status is reported via the keyboard driver or
direct from a quadrature mouse.  This eliminates any requirement for the
X server/other mouse dependent programs to even know what type/style of
mouse you are using.

It would be nice if a standard 'Linux' kernel mouse/keyboard interface
could be established.
   _____
  |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
  |   |       Russell King      [email-masked]         --- ---
  | | | | http://whirligig.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rmk92/home.html  /  /  |
  | +-+-+                                                     --- -+-
  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
 /  | | |      *  who wishes that he was in Hong Kong  *      ---  |
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