Recently I did some work on the input stack in KWin/Wayland, e.g. implemented pointer gesture and pointer constraints protocol, and thought about writing a blog series about how input events get from the device to the application. In the first blog post I focus on creating and configuring an input device and everything that’s related to get this setup.

evdev

Input events are provided by the Linux kernel through the evdev API. If you are interested in how evdev works, I recommend to read the excellent post on that topic by Peter Hutterer. For all we care about the input event API is too low level and we want to use an abstraction for that.

libinput and device files

This abstraction exists and is called libinput. It allows us to get notified whenever an input device gets added or removed and when an input event is generated. But not so fast. First of all we need to open the input devices. And that’s a challenge.

The device files are normally not readable by the user. That’s a good thing as otherwise every application would be able to read all key events. Getting a key logger would be very trivial in that case.

But if KWin runs as a normal user and the user is not able to read from the device files, how can KWin read them? For this we need some support. Libinput is prepared for the situation and doesn’t try to open the files itself, but invokes an open_restricted function the library user has to provide. KWin does so and outsources the task to open the file to logind. Logind allows one process to take control over the current session. And this session controller is allowed to open some device files. So KWin interacts with logind’s dbus API to become the session controller and then opens the device files through the logind API and passes them back to libinput.

This is the reason why for a full Wayland session KWin has a runtime dependency on logind’s DBus interface. Please note that this does not mean that you need to use logind or systemd. It only means that one process is required which speaks logind’s DBus interface.

Devices in KWin

Now libinput is ready to open the device files and emits an LIBINPUT_EVENT_DEVICE_ADDED event for each device. KWin creates a small facade class for each device type and applies configuration options for it. KWin supports reading the configuration options set by Plasma’s mouse configuration module and has an own device specific configuration file which will soon allow the touchpad configuration module to configure the touchpad on Wayland. Also as part of setting up the device KWin enables LEDs – if the device supports them – for Num Lock and Caps Lock.

All the input devices created by KWin can be investigated in the Debug console (open KRunner, enter “KWin”). KWin reads a lot of information about the device from libinput and shows those in the Debug console. In the input event tab each of the events include the information which device generated the event.

All devices are also exported to DBus with the same properties as shown in the Debug console. This means the configuration can be changed at runtime through DBus. KWin saves the configuration after successful apply and thus ensures that your settings are restored correctly when you restart your system or replug your external device. This is also an important feature to support the touchpad configuration module.

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Following in the blog series are: