A Common Input Device Library For Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 12 November 2013 at 05:51 PM EST. 5 Comments
WAYLAND
With the Wayland protocol the matter of handling input device processing is left up to the compositors themselves. To ease the development process and ensuring compositors have good input support, a common input device library has been proposed that compositors can utilize for handling their input events from the Linux kernel.

With the Wayland protocol leaving input handling up to compositors, Jonas Ådahl has decided to try coming up with a common input device library that Wayland compositors could optionally utilize. Jonas did this in part since so far only the Weston compositor has more than basic support for processing of raw evdev input events.

To reduce the need for compositors to effectively re-implement the same support, Jonas Ådahl is seeing if a common input device library is of interest to developers. This library is based upon Weston's input device code and then this libinput API has been simplified/generalized for usage outside of Weston. "The idea is to make it possible for other compositors to be able to plug it in and receive post-processed events such as pointer motion events, key events, touch events."

Jonas Ådahl's libinput library can be found on GitHub for those interested and more details are available from the mailing list announcement.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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