Re: kernel 2.5.59: multiple keyboard devices

[Wayne W. <wh...@ma...>]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 01:33:01PM -0800, Wayne Whitney wrote:
>  
> > P.S.  My application for this is to run a second X server, divorced
> > from the VT system and using its own video card, keyboard and mouse,
> > to achieve multidesktop without explicit kernel or X support.  I
> > understand that the 2.5 ruby multidesktop support is not quite there
> > yet.
> 
> Indeed, this cannot be easily done in 2.5 - the only reasonable way
> would be to modify drivers/char/keyboard.c: connect() function to only
> accept the PS/2 keyboard as a system keyboard by checking for the
> dev->phys field.

Ah, thank you, that makes that easy to do.

However, looking at the XFree86 source code, I see that it assumes
frequently that the console device provides keyboard input and can be used
to control the VTs via ioctl()s.  Would it be difficult to create a
secondary device which provides only the keystrokes from the secondary
keyboard and ignores the VT ioctl()s?  Then I could modify XFree86 to to
be able to use this alternate device as its console device fairly easily,
I think.

On a related note, is there a Input driver for XFree86 that groks the 
linux /dev/input/eventX protocol?

Thanks, Wayne