Subject: Re: Apollo keyboard, serial drivers (announce)
To: None <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
From: Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios@cs.uni-bonn.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 04/15/1997 21:31:52
/dev/wskbd0: ok.
/dev/wsms0: is not universal.

I don't want the mouse driver to listen to all serial ports at half a
dozen bitrates and try to guess whether a serial mouse is connected,
and at what bitrate, and with what protocol.

On PC's (and I suspect: PowerPCs and Alphas with ISA stuff) and DraCos
at least, you can have a dozen mice connected, and even hot-swapped,
given all sorts of bitrate/protocol/device combinations.

Xnetbsd (it it is going to be universal) will need a -mouseDev
/dev/xxx -mouseType someTypeCode parameter (it will be able to
autodetect wsms events, but I dont see how this can be done reasonably
for serial mice with 5.5 protocols at 6 different baud rates).

[It might be reasonable to provide a libmouse.so, which provides Event
encoding for the different protocols... this will make e.g. mouse
interfaces to userland text windowing systems easier.]

Regards,
	Ignatios