[BRLTTY] buglet: uinput is not autoloaded

[Samuel Thibault]

Hi,

Dave Mielke, le Tue 28 Mar 2006 11:13:00 -0500, a écrit :
> [quoted lines by Mario Lang on 2006/03/28 at 16:29 +0200]
> 
> >uinput does not get autoloaded by the kernel in any way,
> >so the user needs to modprobe it, or put it into /etc/modules,
> 
> It's usually best to fix a problem at its source whenever possible. Wouldn't it
> be better, therefore, to fix the kernel so that it does modprobe the facility
> if it's missing at the time it knows it's needed?

How can it know that it is missing?

When using static /dev directory, this is indeed what happens: when
brltty opens /dev/input/uinput, the kernel auto-loads the module. But
with udev, /dev entries only appear when the module is loaded.

That said, brltty could create the character node itself and try to open
it: that should trigger the kernel autoload of the module (provided that
there is the
alias char-major-10-223 uinput
alias in /etc/modprobe.d/)

> >otherwise they will only get the default english keyboard layout
> >for the external keyboard.  
> 
> I'm curious, and would appreciate a more detailed explanation. I thought that
> uinput just sent keycodes through the regular path of entry. Why wouldn't they,
> therefore, go through the normal mapping?

This is indeed what happen. There is probably a misunderstanding here:
Mario's 'otherwise' word _precisely_ means than when uinput is not
available, things don't work fine (since brltty then has to perform the
translation itself for inserting as xlate codes, etc.)

Regards,
Samuel