Re: Getting notification of PS/2 mouse packages

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 01:35:55PM +0200, Michael Thayer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am looking at writing a driver (it is to be open source, but not for
> mainstream kernel inclusion) for a virtual machine-specific input
> device.  Unfortunately one of the versions of the device I have to
> support signals that it has new data available by sending a fake package
> to the PS/2 mouse, so I need to be able to get notification of that
> somehow.  Looking at the kernel source, I see that the i8042 driver
> requests IRQ 12 as IRQF_SHARED, and that the kernel always notifies all
> registered interrupt handlers of an interrupt, even if one of them
> returns IRQ_HANDLED.  So it looks like I can just request my own shared
> handler for IRQ 12 and always return IRQ_NONE, but still update my data.
> However I am not sure whether this is something I can count on to keep
> working in future kernel releases.  Does anyone on this list know more
> about this, or can someone suggest a cleaner way to get the
> notifications I need?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael

Hello, Michael.

My advice is: send it for mainline inclusion!

You more likely get your code reviewed, and it what you do is
acceptable, it will get included and that's a "OK" for your solution.
Then, if it turns out it's not OK anymore, it's much more likely people
will go and fix it for you. At least, that's certainly not going to
happen if it's not published somehow, but out-of-tree drivers or patches
do not usually have the attention of Linux developers.

So, what is it that you consider your work not worth of mainline
inclusion?

Regards,
Cascardo.

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