Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:42:10 +0200 | From | Samuel Thibault <> | Subject | How should an application ask for uinput module load? |
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Hi,
Given a freshly booted linux box, hence uinput is not loaded (why would it be, it doesn't drive any real hardware) ; what is the right way(tm) for an application to have the uinput module loaded, so that it can open /dev/input/uinput for emulating keypresses?
- With good-old static /dev, we could just open /dev/input/uinput (installed by the distribution), and thanks to a alias char-major-10-223 uinput line somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d, uinput finally gets auto-loaded.
- With devfs, it doesn't look like it works (/dev/misc/uinput is not present and opening it just like if it existed doesn't work). But I read in archives that it could be feasible.
- With udev, this just cannot work. As explained in an earlier thread, even using a special filesystem that would report the opening attempt to udevd wouldn't work fine since udevd takes time for creating the device, and hence the original program needs to be notified ; this becomes racy.
So what is the correct way to do it? I can see two approaches:
Using modprobe: - try to use /dev/input/uinput ; if it succeeds, fine. - else, if errno != ENOENT, fail - else, (ENOENT) - try to call `cat /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe` uinput - try to use /dev/input/uinput again ; if it succeeds, fine - else, assume that it really wasn't compiled, and hence fail.
Triggering auto-load by creating one's own node. - try to use /dev/input/uinput ; if it suceeds, fine. - else, if errno != ENOENT, fail - else, (ENOENT) - mknod /somewhere/safe/uinput c 10 223 - use /somewhere/safe/uinput ; if it succeeds, fine - else, assume that it really wasn't compiled, and hence fail.
I guess the same problem arises for loop devices and all such virtual devices...
Regards, Samuel - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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