It seems we can't ever get rid of the issues with this series. Daniel Martin filed a kernel bug for the latest series of these devices (Oct 2014) and it looks like they all need manual fixing again.

When the *40 series first came out, the PS/2 firmware was buggy and advertised bogus coordinate ranges for the x/y axes. Since we use those coordinate ranges to set up the size and position of software buttons (very much needed since that series did away with the physical trackpoint buttons) we added kernel patches for each of those laptops. The kernel would match on the PNPID (e.g. LEN0036 on a T440) and fix the min/max range for both axes based actual measurements. Since this requires someone to have a laptop, measure it, file a bug or send a patch, wait for it to get into the kernel, wait for it to get into distros it took quite a while to get all models supported.

Lenovo has updated the series in Oct 2014 and it's starting to get in the hands of users. And as it turns out, the touchpads now have different coordinate ranges but the same PNPID. And the values reported by the firmware are still bogus, so we need the same quirk, again, for each touchpad. Update 22/01/15: looks like the ranges are correct enough, so we don't need to update all ranges separately.

So in short: if you have one of the latest series *40 touchpads, your touchpad software buttons will be off. CC yourself on the kernel bug and if you have a model that's not listed there yet, add the required data. Eventually that will end up in the kernel and then everything is hunky-dory again. Until then, have a drink on behalf of the Synaptics/Lenovo QA departments.

Now the obvious question: why does this work with Windows? They don't use the PS/2 protocol but the SMBus/RMI4 interface and thus PS/2 firmware correctness is apparently not top priority for the QA departments. But the SMBus protocol requires the Host Notify feature, which caused Synaptics to reimplement the i2c driver for Windows. And that's what is shipped/preinstalled as driver. We don't support Host Notify on Linux, so there goes that idea. But there's strong suspicion that's not the only piece of the puzzle that's missing anyway...

Update 22/01/15: The min/max ranges advertised seem to be correct in the newer versions which would indicate that Synaptics has fixed the firmware. That's great (except for re-using the PNPID). Now we need to just detect that and drop the quirks for the newer touchpads. Hans has a good suggestion for how to do this, so with a bit of luck this will end up being only one kernel patch instead of one per device.

22 Jan 2015 1:27am GMT

So Red Hat are currently looking to hire into the various teams building and supporting efforts such as the Fedora Workstation, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and of course Fedora and RHEL in generaL. We are looking at hiring around 6-7 people to help move these and other Red Hat efforts forward. We are open to candidates from any country where Red Hat has a presence, but for a subset of the positions candidates relocating to our main engineering offices in Brno, Czech Republic or Westford, Massachussets, USA, will be a requirement or candidates interested in that will be given preference. We are looking for a mix of experienced and junior candidates, so regardless of it you are fresh out of school or haven been around for a while this might be for you.

So instead of providing a list of job descriptions what I want to do here is list of various skills and backgrounds we want and then we will adjust the exact role of the candidates we end up hiring depending on the mix of skills we find. So this might be for you if you are a software developer and have one or more of these skills or backgrounds:

* Able to program in C
* Able to program in Ruby
* Able to program in Javascript
* Able to program in Assembly
* Able to program in Python
* Experience with Linux Kernel development
* Experience with GTK+
* Experience with Wayland
* Experience with x.org
* Experience with developing for PPC architecture
* Experience with compiler optimisations
* Experience with llvm-pipe
* Experience with SPICE
* Experience with developing software like Virtualbox, VNC, RDP or similar
* Experience with building web services
* Experience with OpenGL development
* Experience with release engineering
* Experience with Project Atomic
* Experience with graphics driver enablement
* Experience with other PC hardware enablement
* Experience with enterprise software management tools like Satellite or ManageIQ
* Experience with accessibility software
* Experience with RPM packaging
* Experience with Fedora
* Experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
* Experience with GNOME

It should be clear from the list above that we are not just looking for people with a background in desktop development this time around, two of the positions for instance will mostly be dealing with Linux kernel development. We are looking for people here who can help us make sure the latest and greatest laptops on the market works great with Fedora and RHEL, be that on the graphics side or in terms of general hardware enablement. These jobs will put you right in the middle of the action in terms of defining the future of the 3 Fedora variants, especially the Workstation; defining the future of Red Hats Enterprise Linux Workstation products and pushing the Linux platform in general forward.

If you are interested in talking with us about if we can find a place for you in Red Hat as part of this hiring round please send me your CV and some words about yourself and I will make sure to put you in contact with our recruiters. And if you are unsure about what kind of things we work on here I suggest taking a look at my latest blog about our Fedora Workstation 22 efforts to see a small sample of some of the things we are currently working on.

You can reach me at cschalle(at)redhat(dot)com.

21 Jan 2015 6:37pm GMT

A Fedora 22 feature is to use the libinput X.Org driver as default driver for all non-tablet devices. This replaces the current defaults of synaptics for touchpads and evdev for anything else (tablets usually use the wacom driver, if installed). As expected, changing a default has some repercussions both for users and for developers. These are outlined below, based on the libinput 0.8 release. Future versions may add features, so check with your latest local version. Generally, the behaviour should roughly stay the same, big changes such as devices not being detected or not working is most likely a bug. Some behaviours are new, e.g. always-on palm detection, top software buttons on specific touchpads, etc. If in doubt, check the libinput documentation for hints on whether something is supposed to work in a particular manner.

Changes visible to Users

Any custom xorg.conf snippets will cease to work, if they are properly stacked. Options set by snippets are almost always exclusive to one particular driver. When the default driver changes, the snippet may not apply to the device anymore. Whether they stop working depends whether the Driver line is present. Consider this example snippet:

Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "enable tapping"
  MatchProduct "my touchpad"
  Driver "synaptics"
  Option "TapButton1" "1"
EndSection

This snippet does two things: it assigns the synaptics driver to the "my mouse" device and sets the option TapButton1. The assignment will override the default libinput assignment, i.e. this device won't change behaviour, you just don't get to use any new features. If the Driver line is not present then this snippet won't do anything, the libinput driver does not provide a TapButton1 option. It is safe to leave the snippet in place, options that are not supported by a driver are simply ignored.

The xf86-input-libinput man page has a list of options that can be set. For example, the above snippet would have an equivalent as

Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "enable tapping"
  MatchDriver "libinput"
  MatchProduct "my touchpad"
  Option "Tapping" "on"
EndSection

Note that this matches on a driver rather than assign the driver. Since options are driver-specific this is the correct approach.

The other visible change is a difference in default pointer speed. We have fine-tuning pointer acceleration on our TODO lists, but we're not quite there yet and any help would be appreciated. In the meantime you may see changes in pointer acceleration.

Finally, you may see certain features have gone the way of the dodo. Specifically the touchpad code exposes a lot less knobs to tweak. Most of that is intentional, some of it may warrant discussion. If there is a particular feature you are missing or doesn't work as you want to, please file a bug.

Changes visible to developers

These changes affect desktop environments, specifically the part that configures input devices. The changes affect three categories: pointer acceleration, button mapping, touchpad disabling and device properties. The property "libinput Send Events Modes Available" exists on all devices, it can be used to determine if a device is handled by the libinput driver.

Pointer acceleration

The X server exposes a variety of knobs for its pointer acceleration code. The oldest knob (and specified in the core protocol) is the XChangePointerControl request. In some environments this is exposed as a single slider, in others it's split into multiple settings (Acceleration and Threshold, for example).

libinput does away with this and only exposes a single 1-value float property "libinput Accel Speed" with a range of -1 (slowest) to 1 (fastest). The XChangePointerControl request has no effect on a libinput device. It is up to you how to map the current speed mappings into the [-1, 1] range.

Button mapping

The X server provides button mapping through the XSetPointerMapping request. This is most commonly used to apply a left-handed configuration and to enable natural scrolling. The call will continue to work with the libinput driver, but better methods are available.

The property "libinput Left Handed Enabled" takes a single boolean 8-bit value to enable and disable left-handed mode. Unlike the X request this will automatically take care of the tapping configuration (and other things in the future). If the property is not available on a device, that device has no left-handed mode.

The property "libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled" takes a single boolean 8-bit value to enable and disable natural scrolling. This applies to smooth scrolling and legacy button scrolling (which the libinput driver doesn't do anyway). If the property is not available on a device, that device has no natural scrolling mode.

Touchpad disabling

In the synaptics driver, disabling the touchpad is usually done with the "Synaptics Off" property. This is used by syndaemon to turn the touchpad off while typing. libinput does this by default, so it is safe to simply ignore this at all. Don't bother starting syndaemon, it won't control the libinput driver.

Device properties

Any code that handles a driver-specific property (prefixed by "evdev" or "synaptics") will stop working. These properties are not exposed by the libinput driver (we tried, it was not viable). KDE's kcm_touchpad module is a particularly bad offender here, it exposes almost every toggle the driver ever had. Make sure the code behaves well if the properties are not present and you're basically good to go.

If you decide to handle libinput-specific properties, the general rule is: if a single-value property is not present, that configuration does not apply to this device. Bitmask-style properties are split into an "libinput foo Available" and "libinput foo Enabled". The former lists the available settings, the latter enables a specific setting. Have a look at the xf86-input-libinput source for details on each property.

19 Jan 2015 8:57pm GMT

So Fedora Workstation 21 is done and out and I am extremely pleased to see the positive reception and great reviews. But we are not resting on our laurels here and are already busy planning for the Fedora Workstation 22 release. As many of you might know Fedora Workstation 22 is going to come up relatively fast, so we only have about 6 more weeks of development on it feature the freezes starts to kick inn. Luckily we have a relatively long list of items that we started working on during the Fedora Workstation 21 cycle that is nearing completing and thus should make the next release. We are of course also working on bigger long term developments that you should maybe see the first outline of in Fedora 22, but not the final version. I thought it would be nice to summarize some of the bigger items we expect to land and link to the relevant blogs and announcements for each one.

Wayland
So first out is to give an update on our work on Wayland as I know that is something a lot of people are curios about. We are continuing to make great strides forward and recently hired Jonas Ådahl to the team who many might recognize as an active Wayland and libinput developer. He will be spearheading our overall Wayland effort as we are approaching the finish line. All in all things are looking good, we got a lot of the basic plumbing in place for Fedora Workstation 21, so most works these days is mostly focused on polish and cleanups. One of the bigger items is the migration to use libinput. libinput is a library we decided to create to be able to share input device handling between X and Wayland and thus make the transition smoother and lower our workload during the transition period. Libinput itself is getting very close to feature complete and they are even working on some new features for it now taking it beyond what was in X. Peter Hutterer recently released version 0.8 and we expect to have 1.0 out and in use for both X.org and Wayland in time for Fedora Workstation 22.
In parallel we are also working on porting the needed bits in GNOME over to use libinput and remove any lingering X dependencies, like the GNOME Control Center which should also be ready for Fedora Workstation 22.

Another major change related to Wayland in Fedora Workstation 22 is that we will switch the default backends in GTK+ and SDL over to using Wayland. Currently in Fedora Workstation 21 applications are actually running on top of XWayland, but in Fedora Workstation 22 at least GTK+ and SDL applications will be default to Wayland when run under the Wayland session.
The Wayland SDL backend has been around for quite a bit, but Jonas Ådahl plans on spending some time smoothing out the last rough edges, in fact for SDL applications we hope we can actually provide noticeable performance improvement over X in some cases (not because OpenGL will be faster of course, but because we might be able to be smarter about handling different resolutions between desktop and game), but we have to wait and see if that pans out or if we have to settle for performance parity with X. We are also looking at getting the login session to use Wayland by default. All in all this should take us a huge step forward towards making using Wayland feel real.

As it looks now Wayland should be quite close to what you would define as feature complete for Fedora Workstation 22, but one thing that is going to take longer to reach maturity is the support for binary drivers, especially the NVidia ones. This of course is a task that mostly falls on NVidia for natural reasons, but we are trying to help out by Adam Jackson working to making sure Mesa works with their proposed EGLStreams and OpenGL Dispatcher proposals. So during the course of the coming year we will likely have a situation that you will be able to have a production ready Wayland session if you are running any of the open source drivers, but if you want to run Wayland on top of the NVidia binary driver that is most likely to only really be possible towards the end of the year. That said this is a guesstimate from our side as how quick the heavy lifting will happen, and how quickly it will be released by NVidia for public consumption is of course all relying on internal plans and resources at NVidia and not something we control.

Battery life
One thing we know being developers ourselves and from speaking with developers about their operating system of choice, battery life is among the top 5 reasons for what choice people make about their hardware and software. Due to this Owen Taylor has been investigating for some time now both what solutions exist today, what other operating systems are doing and what approaches we can take to improve battery life. Because a common complaint we hear from a lot of people is that they don't feel they get great battery life when running linux on their laptops currently. Some people are able to solve this using powertop, but we feel there are a lot of room for automatically give our users better battery life beyond manual tweaking user powertop.

Improving battery life is a complex issue in many ways, including figuring out how to measure battery life. I guess everyone has seen laptops advertised with X number of hours of battery life, but it is our impression that those numbers tend to be quite bogus even when running the bundled operating system. In some testing we done we concluded that the worst offenders numbers could only true if you left your laptop idle in the corner with the screen blacked out. So gnome-battery-bench will help us achieve a couple of things, it should generate comparable battery lifetime numbers which both should help our users choose the hardware that gives the best battery life under linux and it also lets us as developers keep tracking how changes affect battery life so that we can catch regressions for instance. It also lets us verify the effect various kernel tuneables or ambient light detection schemes have on battery life in a better way than we can with existing tools. We also hope to use this to work with vendors to improve the battery life of their hardware when running Fedora or RHEL. Anyway, I suggest reading Owens Taylors blog for some more details of his work on improving battery life..

One important effort we want to undertake here, which might not all make it for Fedora Workstation 22, is taking advantage of the ambient light detectors in many modern laptops. One of the biggest battery drains in your system is the screen brightness setting and by using the ambient light detection hardware we hope to be able to put in place some intelligent behavior for different situations. This is a hard problem though and it was attempted solved in GNOME before, but the end result back then was that people felt they where "fighting" GNOME over their laptop brightness settings, so in the end it was dropped completely, so we need to careful to not repeat that outcome.

Application bundles
Another major effort that is not going to ready for Fedora Workstation 22, but which we might have some preview of is Application bundles. Matthias Clasen recently sent out an email to the Fedora Desktop mailing list outlining the state of the application bundles work. This is a continuation of the Sandboxed Applications in GNOME proposal from Lennart Poettering. The effort is being spearheaded by Alexander Larsson and the goal is to build the infrastructure needed to do sandboxed desktop applications efficiently. There is a wiki page up already detailing Sandboxed Apps and there are some test applications already available. For instance you can grab an application bundle of Builder, the cool new IDE project from Christian Hergert. (Hint, make sure to support his Builder crowdfunding effort if you have not already.). Once this effort matures it will revolutionize how desktop applications are built and distributed. It should make life easier for application developers as these bundled applications are designed to be distribution agnostic and the sandboxing aspect should help improve security. Also the transition should put the application developers directly in charge of the update cycle of their applications enabling them to better support their users.

3rd Party Application handling
So the ever resourceful Richard Hughes has been working on adding support for handling 3rd party applications in GNOME Software. He outlined this effort in a recent blog post about GNOME Software.

While the end goal here it to offer 3rd party application bundles as described in the section above, the feature has also a lot of near term advantages. We have seen that over the course of the last years we moved from a model where you use your browser to search for software online to users expecting to find all software available for a system through its app store. With this 3rd party application support available in GNOME Software we can start working to make that expectation a reality also in Fedora. We took great strides forward in Fedora Workstation 21 with having metadata available for most of the standard applications packaged in Fedora, but there is also a lot of popular applications and other things out there that people tend to install and use which we for various reasons are not interested or able to ship in Fedora. The reason for this can range from licensing issues, to packaging issues to simply resource issues. With Richards work we will be able to make such software discoverable in Fedora, yet make a clear distinction between the software we have vetted and checked and the software you get from 3rd parties.

How to deal with 3rd party software has been a long and ongoing discussion in the Fedora community, and there are a lot of practical and principal details to deal with, but hopefully with this infrastructure in place it will be a lot easier to navigate those issues as people have something concrete to relate to instead of just abstract ideas and concepts.

One challenge for instance we have to figure out is that on one side we don't want 3rd party software offered in Fedora to be some for of endorsement or sign of being somehow vetted by the Fedora Project on an ongoing basis, yet on the other side the list will most likely need to be based on some form of editorial process to for instance protect both Red Hat and Fedora from potential legal threats. I plan on sending an initial proposal to the Workstation Working Group soon for how this can work and once we hashed out the details there we will need to bring the Working groups proposal into the wider Fedora community as this also affects our Cloud and Server offering.

File Manager
A lot of people these days use Google Drive, be that personally or because their company has a corporate Google apps account. So to make life easier for our users we are making sure that Nautilus are able to treat your Google drive as just another drive on the system, letting you drag and drop files off or on it. We also dedicated some effort to clean up and modernize the file manager in general, with Carlos Soriano blogging about his efforts there just before Christmas. All in all I think these are improvements that should improve the life of our developer and sysadmin target audience, but of course they are also very useful improvements to the general linux using public.

Qt Theming
One of the things we had to postpone for Fedora Workstation 21 was the Adwaita theme for Qt applications. We are expecting it to hit Fedora Workstation 22 though and you can get the theme to install and test from Martin Briza copr repository. The end goal here is wether you run a pure Qt application like Skype or Scribus, or a KDE application like Krita or Amarok, you should get an Adwaita look and feel to the application. Of course desktop integration isn't just about a theme, there is a reason the GNOME HIG exists, but this should be an improvement over the current situation. The theme currently targets Qt4, but of course Qt5 is also on the roadmap for a later release.

Further terminal improvements
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry about Fedora Workstation we realize that the terminal is the most important application for many developers and sysadmins. So we are also hoping to land some more of the terminal improvements we been working on in Fedora Workstation 21. The notifications for long running jobs being maybe the thing I know a lot of developers are excited about getting their hands on. It will let you for instance start a long compile in a terminal and know that you will be notified once it is completed instead of having to manually check in from time to time.

More development tools
In my opinion the best IDE for Python development currently is PyCharm. And not only is it the best from a functionality standpoint they also decided to release an open source version last year. That said we have been struggling a bit with the packaging of PyCharm, and interestingly enough it is one of those applications I think will benefit greatly from the application bundle work we are doing, but in the meantime we at least do have a Copr of PyCharm available. It is still an open question, but we might make this CoPR one of our testcases for the 3rd party application support in GNOME Software as mentioned earlier. Anyway if you are a Python developer I strongly recommend taking a lot at it. Personally I looked at various Python IDEs over the years, but always ended up just going back to Gedit, but when trying PyCharm it was the first time I felt that the application actually offered me useful functionality beyond what a text editor like Gedit does. Also in recent versions they also deal well with the introspection based Python bindings for GTK3 which was a great boon for me.

We are also looking at improving the development story around Vagrant and doing Fedora and RHEL development, more details on that at a later point.

ABRT improvements
The ABRT tool has become a crucial development tool for us over the last couple of years. The Fedora Retrace server is one of our main tools
for prioritizing which bugs to look at first and a crucial part of our goal of making Fedora a solid
distribution. That said, especially its early days, ABRT has had its share of detractors and people
being a bit frustrated with it, so Bastien Nocera and Allan Day has been working with the ABRT team to both integrate
it further with the desktop, for instance ensuring that it follows your desktop wide privacy settings
and to make sure that the user experience of submitting a retrace report is as smooth and intuitive as possible
and not to mention as unobtrusive as possible, for instance you don't want ABRT to choke your system while trying to generate
a stack trace for us. The Fedora Workstation Tasklist contains links to bugzilla and github so you can track their progress.

Still a lot to do!
So making our vision for the Fedora Workstation come through takes of course a lot of effort from a lot of people. And we are really lucky to be part of such a great community where so much cool stuff is happening all the time. I mean the Builder effort from Christian Hergert as I talked about earlier is one of them, but there are so many other things happening too. So if you want to get involved take a look at our tasklist and see if there is anything that interests you or for that matter if there is something that you think should be worked on, but isn't on the list yet. Then come join us either on #fedora-workstation on the freenode IRC network or join the fedora-desktop mailing list.

19 Jan 2015 4:05pm GMT

So I'm stuck somewhere on an airport and jetlagged on my return trip from my very first LCA in Auckland - awesome conference, except for being on the wrong side of the globe: Very broad range of speakers, awesome people all around, great organization and since it's still a community conference none of the marketing nonsense and sales-pitch keynotes.

Also done a presentation about botching up ioctls. Compared to my blog post a bunch more details on technical issues and some overall comments on what's really important to avoid a v2 ioctl because v1 ended up being unsalvageable. Slides and video (curtesy the LCA video team).

19 Jan 2015 5:55am GMT

libinput 0.8 was released yesterday. One feature I'd like to talk about here: the change to provide mouse wheel events as physical distances.

Mouse wheels are clicks. In the evdev protocol they're sent via the REL_WHEEL and REL_HWHEEL axes, with a value of 1 per click. Spinning the wheel fast enough will give you a higher value per event but it's still just a multiple of the physical clicks. This is a conundrum for libinput.

libinput exports scroll events as "axis" events, the value returned by libinput_event_pointer_get_axis_value() for touchpads and button scrolling is in "pixels". libinput doesn't have a concept of pixels of course but the compositor will likely take the relative motion and apply it to the cursor. Scroll events are in the same coordinate space, i.e. the scrolling for two-finger scrolling has the same feel as moving the pointer. This continuous coordinate space is at odds with the discrete values coming from a wheel. We added axis sources to the API so you can now tell whether an event was generated by the wheel or some other scroll methods. But still, the discrete values from a wheel are at odds with the other sources.

For libinput 0.8, we changed the default reporting mode of the wheel. For the click count, a new call libinput_event_pointer_get_axis_value_discrete() provides that number (positive and negative for both direction). The libinput_event_pointer_get_axis_value() on a wheel now returns the movement of the wheel in degrees. That gives us a continuous coordinate space that also opens up new possibilities: if you know the rotation of a mouse wheel in degrees, you know things like "has the wheel been turned a full rotation". I don't quite know how, but I'm sure there are interesting interfaces you can make from that :)

Of course, the physical properties don't change, the degrees are always a multiple of the click count, and on most mice one click count is a 15 degree movement. The Logitech M325 is a notable exception here with a 20 degree angle. This isn't advertised by the hardware of course so we rely on the udev hwdb to set it where it differs from the default. The patch for this has been pushed to systemd and will soon arrive at a distribution near you.

And to answer a question I'm sure will come up: those mice that support a free spinning scrollwheel don't change the reporting mode. The G500s for example merely moves a physical bit that provides friction and the click feel/noise. The device still reports in 15 degree angle counts. I strongly suspect that other mice with this feature are the same (if not, we can now work this continuous motion into libinput and handle it propertly).

15 Jan 2015 11:47pm GMT

After nearly 12 years working on Gentoo and hearing blathering about how "Gentoo is about choice" and "Gentoo is a metadistribution," I've come to a conclusion to where we need to go if we want to remain viable as a Linux distribution.

If we want to have any relevance, we need to have focus. Everything for everybody is a guarantee that you'll be nothing for nobody. So I've come up with three specific use cases for Gentoo that I'd like to see us focus on:

People developing software

As Gentoo comes, by default, with a guaranteed-working toolchain, it's a natural fit for software developers. A few years back, I tried to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. It was unbelievable painful. More recently, I attempted the same on a Mac. Same result - a total nightmare if you aren't building for Mac or iOS.

Gentoo, on the other hand, provides a proven-working development environment because you build everything from scratch as you install the OS. If you need headers or some library, it's already there. No problem. Whereas I've attempted to get all of the barebones dev packages installed on many other systems and it's been hugely painful.

Frankly, I've never come across as easy of a dev environment as Gentoo, if you've managed to set it up as a user in the first place. And that's the real problem.

People who need extreme flexibility (embedded, etc.)

Nearly 10 years ago, I founded the high-performance clustering project in Gentoo, because it was a fantastic fit for my needs as an end user in a higher-ed setting. As it turns out, it was also a good fit for a number of other folks, primarily in academia but also including the Adelie Linux team.

What we found was that you could get an extra 5% or so of performance out of building everything from scratch. At small scale that sounds absurd, but when that translates into 5-6 digits or more of infrastructure purchases, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

In related environments, I worked on porting v5 of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) to Gentoo. This was the first version that was distro-native vs pretending to be a custom distro in its own right, and the lightweight footprint of a diskless terminal was a perfect fit for Gentoo.

In fact, around the same time I fit Gentoo onto a 1.8MB floppy-disk image, including either the dropbear SSH client or the kdrive X server for a graphical environment. This was only possible through the magic of the ROOT and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT variables, which you couldn't find in any other distro.

Other distros such as ChromeOS and CoreOS have taken similar advantage of Gentoo's metadistribution nature to build heavily customized Linux distros.

People who want to learn how Linux works

Finally, another key use case for Gentoo is for people who really want to understand how Linux works. Because the installation handbook actually works you through the entire process of installing a Linux distro by hand, you acquire a unique viewpoint and skillset regarding what it takes to run Linux, well beyond what other distros require. In fact I'd argue that it's a uniquely portable and low-level skillset that you can apply much more broadly than those you could acquire elsewhere.

In conclusion

I've suggested three core use cases that I think Gentoo should focus on. If it doesn't fit those use cases, I would suggest that we allow but not specifically dedicate effort to enabling those particulars.

We've gotten overly deadened to how people want to use Linux, and this is my proposal as to how we could regain it.

Tagged: gentoo

14 Jan 2015 3:36am GMT

If you read this blog entry it is very likely that you are a direct beneficiary of open source and free software. Like myself you probably have been able to get hold of, use and tinker with software that in the old world of closed source dominance would all together have cost you maybe ten thousand dollars or more. So with the spirit of the Yuletide season fresh in mind it is time to open your wallet and support some important open source fundraising campaigns.

The first one is the Builder, an IDE of our GNOME which is an effort by the unstoppable Christian Hergert to create a truly powerful and modern IDE for GNOME. Christian has already made huge strides forward with his project since quiting his dayjob to start it, and helping fund him to cross the finish line would be greatly beneficial to us all. And I think it would make a wonderful addition to the Fedora Workstation effort, so this is an easy way for you to help us move that effort forward too. So head over to the fundraiser webpage or start by viewing the great fundraiser video below:

The second effort I want to highlight is the still ongoing fundraiser for the PiTiVi video editor. Since they started that effort they have raised 22190 USD of the 35 000 USD they need to get PiTiVi to a level where they are confident to make a 1.0 release. And I think we all agree that having a top notch video editor avaiable, especially one that uses GStreamer and thus helps improve our general multimedia story is very important. This effort also has a nice introduction video if I want to know more:

I have personally contributed money to both these efforts and I hope you will too! Both projects are crucial for the long term health of the ecosystem and both are done by credible teams with the right skills to succeed. So for those of us out of school and in paying jobs, setting aside for example 100 USD to help these two efforts should be an easy choice to make, the value we will get back easily dwarfs that amount.

05 Jan 2015 3:34pm GMT

I just pushed up a new branch to my LLVM repo that enables two important LLVM codegen features (machine scheduling and subreg livenes) for SI+ targets, which should improve performance of the radeonsi driver.

The biggest improvement that I'm seeing with this branch is the luxmark luxball OpenCL demo which is about 60% faster on my Bonaire. Other tests I've done show 10% - 25% improvements in performance. I haven't done much OpenGL benchmarking, but I expect these changes will have much bigger impact on the OpenCL benchmarks, so OpenGL improvements may be in the lower end of that range. I still need more benchmark results to know for sure.

01 Jan 2015 8:00pm GMT

20 Dec 2014 8:03pm GMT

Multi-Stream Transport 4k Monitors and X

I'm sure you've seen a 4k monitor on a friends desk running Mac OS X or Windows and are all ready to go get one so that you can use it under Linux.

Once you've managed to acquire one, I'm afraid you'll discover that when you plug it in, you're limited to 30Hz refresh rates at the full size, unless you're running a kernel that is version 3.17 or later. And then...

Good Grief! What Is My Computer Doing!

Ok, so now you're running version 3.17 and when X starts up, it's like you're using a gigantic version of Google Cardboard. Two copies of a very tall, but very narrow screen greets you.

Welcome to MST island.

In order to drive these giant new panels at full speed, there isn't enough bandwidth in the display hardware to individually paint each pixel once during each frame. So, like all good hardware engineers, they invented a clever hack.

This clever hack paints the screen in parallel. I'm assuming that they've got two bits of display hardware, each one hooked up to half of the monitor. Now, each paints only half of the pixels, avoiding costly redesign of expensive silicon, at least that's my surmise.

In the olden days, if you did this, you'd end up running two monitor cables to your computer, and potentially even having two video cards. Today, thanks to the magic of Display Port Multi-Stream Transport, we don't need all of that; instead, MST allows us to pack multiple cables-worth of data into a single cable.

I doubt the inventors of MST intended it to be used to split a single LCD panel into multiple "monitors", but hardware engineers are clever folk and are more than capable of abusing standards like this when it serves to save a buck.

Turning Two Back Into One

We've got lots of APIs that expose monitor information in the system, and across which we might be able to wave our magic abstraction wand to fix this:

1. The KMS API. This is the kernel interface which is used by all graphics stuff, including user-space applications and the frame buffer console. Solve the problem here and it works everywhere automatically.

2. The libdrm API. This is just the KMS ioctls wrapped in a simple C library. Fixing things here wouldn't make fbcons work, but would at least get all of the window systems working.

3. Every 2D X driver. (Yeah, we're trying to replace all of these with the one true X driver). Fixing the problem here would mean that all X desktops would work. However, that's a lot of code to hack, so we'll skip this.

4. The X server RandR code. More plausible than fixing every driver, this also makes X desktops work.

5. The RandR library. If not in the X server itself, how about over in user space in the RandR protocol library? Well, the problem here is that we've now got two of them (Xlib and xcb), and the xcb one is auto-generated from the protocol descriptions. Not plausible.

6. The Xinerama code in the X server. Xinerama is how we did multi-monitor stuff before RandR existed. These days, RandR provides Xinerama emulation, but we've been telling people to switch to RandR directly.

7. Some new API. Awesome. Ok, so if we haven't fixed this in any existing API we control (kernel/libdrm/X.org), then we effectively dump the problem into the laps of the desktop and application developers. Given how long it's taken them to adopt current RandR stuff, providing yet another complication in their lives won't make them very happy.

All Our APIs Suck

Dave Airlie merged MST support into the kernel for version 3.17 in the simplest possible fashion -- pushing the problem out to user space. I was initially vaguely tempted to go poke at it and try to fix things there, but he eventually convinced me that it just wasn't feasible.

It turns out that all of our fancy new modesetting APIs describe the hardware in more detail than any application actually cares about. In particular, we expose a huge array of hardware objects:

• Subconnectors
• Connectors
• Outputs
• Video modes
• Crtcs
• Encoders

Each of these objects exposes intimate details about the underlying hardware -- which of them can work together, and which cannot; what kinds of limits are there on data rates and formats; and pixel-level timing details about blanking periods and refresh rates.

To make things work, some piece of code needs to actually hook things up, and explain to the user why the configuration they want just isn't possible.

The sticking point we reached was that when an MST monitor gets plugged in, it needs two CRTCs to drive it. If one of those is already in use by some other output, there's just no way you can steal it for MST mode.

Another problem -- we expose EDID data and actual video mode timings. Our MST monitor has two EDID blocks, one for each half. They happen to describe how they're related, and how you should configure them, but if we want to hide that from the application, we'll have to pull those EDID blocks apart and construct a new one. The same goes for video modes; we'll have to construct ones for MST mode.

Every single one of our APIs exposes enough of this information to be dangerous.

Every one, except Xinerama. All it talks about is a list of rectangles, each of which represents a logical view into the desktop. Did I mention we've been encouraging people to stop using this? And that some of them listened to us? Foolishly?

Dave's Tiling Property

Dave hacked up the X server to parse the EDID strings and communicate the layout information to clients through an output property. Then he hacked up the gnome code to parse that property and build a RandR configuration that would work.

Then, he changed to RandR Xinerama code to also parse the TILE properties and to fix up the data seen by application from that.

This works well enough to get a desktop running correctly, assuming that desktop uses Xinerama to fetch this data. Alas, gtk has been "fixed" to use RandR if you have RandR version 1.3 or later. No biscuit for us today.

Adding RandR Monitors

RandR doesn't have enough data types yet, so I decided that what we wanted to do was create another one; maybe that would solve this problem.

Ok, so what clients mostly want to know is which bits of the screen are going to be stuck together and should be treated as a single unit. With current RandR, that's some of the information included in a CRTC. You pull the pixel size out of the associated mode, physical size out of the associated outputs and the position from the CRTC itself.

Most of that information is available through Xinerama too; it's just missing physical sizes and any kind of labeling to help the user understand which monitor you're talking about.

The other problem with Xinerama is that it cannot be configured by clients; the existing RandR implementation constructs the Xinerama data directly from the RandR CRTC settings. Dave's Tiling property changes edit that data to reflect the union of associated monitors as a single Xinerama rectangle.

Allowing the Xinerama data to be configured by clients would fix our 4k MST monitor problem as well as solving the longstanding video wall, WiDi and VNC troubles. All of those want to create logical monitor areas within the screen under client control

What I've done is create a new RandR datatype, the "Monitor", which is a rectangular area of the screen which defines a rectangular region of the screen. Each monitor has the following data:

• Name. This provides some way to identify the Monitor to the user. I'm using X atoms for this as it made a bunch of things easier.

• Primary boolean. This indicates whether the monitor is to be considered the "primary" monitor, suitable for placing toolbars and menus.

• Pixel geometry (x, y, width, height). These locate the region within the screen and define the pixel size.

• Physical geometry (width-in-millimeters, height-in-millimeters). These let the user know how big the pixels will appear in this region.

• List of outputs. (I think this is the clever bit)

There are three requests to define, delete and list monitors. And that's it.

Now, we want the list of monitors to completely describe the environment, and yet we don't want existing tools to break completely. So, we need some way to automatically construct monitors from the existing RandR state while still letting the user override portions of it as needed to explain virtual or tiled outputs.

So, what I did was to let the client specify a list of outputs for each monitor. All of the CRTCs which aren't associated with an output in any client-defined monitor are then added to the list of monitors reported back to clients. That means that clients need only define monitors for things they understand, and they can leave the other bits alone and the server will do something sensible.

The second tricky bit is that if you specify an empty rectangle at 0,0 for the pixel geometry, then the server will automatically compute the geometry using the list of outputs provided. That means that if any of those outputs get disabled or reconfigured, the Monitor associated with them will appear to change as well.

Current Status

Gtk+ has been switched to use RandR for RandR versions 1.3 or later. Locally, I hacked libXrandr to override the RandR version through an environment variable, set that to 1.2 and Gtk+ happily reverts back to Xinerama and things work fine. I suspect the plan here will be to have it use the new Monitors when present as those provide the same info that it was pulling out of RandR's CRTCs.

KDE appears to still use Xinerama data for this, so it "just works".

Where's the code

As usual, all of the code for this is in a collection of git repositories in my home directory on fd.o:

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/randrproto master
git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/libXrandr master
git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xrandr master
git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xserver randr-monitors

RandR protocol changes

Here's the new sections added to randrproto.txt

                  ❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

1.5. Introduction to version 1.5 of the extension

Version 1.5 adds monitors

 • A 'Monitor' is a rectangular subset of the screen which represents
   a coherent collection of pixels presented to the user.

 • Each Monitor is be associated with a list of outputs (which may be
   empty).

 • When clients define monitors, the associated outputs are removed from
   existing Monitors. If removing the output causes the list for that
   monitor to become empty, that monitor will be deleted.

 • For active CRTCs that have no output associated with any
   client-defined Monitor, one server-defined monitor will
   automatically be defined of the first Output associated with them.

 • When defining a monitor, setting the geometry to all zeros will
   cause that monitor to dynamically track the bounding box of the
   active outputs associated with them

This new object separates the physical configuration of the hardware
from the logical subsets  the screen that applications should
consider as single viewable areas.

1.5.1. Relationship between Monitors and Xinerama

Xinerama's information now comes from the Monitors instead of directly
from the CRTCs. The Monitor marked as Primary will be listed first.

                  ❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

5.6. Protocol Types added in version 1.5 of the extension

MONITORINFO { name: ATOM
          primary: BOOL
          automatic: BOOL
          x: INT16
          y: INT16
          width: CARD16
          height: CARD16
          width-in-millimeters: CARD32
          height-in-millimeters: CARD32
          outputs: LISTofOUTPUT }

                  ❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

7.5. Extension Requests added in version 1.5 of the extension.

┌───
    RRGetMonitors
    window : WINDOW
     ▶
    timestamp: TIMESTAMP
    monitors: LISTofMONITORINFO
└───
    Errors: Window

    Returns the list of Monitors for the screen containing
    'window'.

    'timestamp' indicates the server time when the list of
    monitors last changed.

┌───
    RRSetMonitor
    window : WINDOW
    info: MONITORINFO
└───
    Errors: Window, Output, Atom, Value

    Create a new monitor. Any existing Monitor of the same name is deleted.

    'name' must be a valid atom or an Atom error results.

    'name' must not match the name of any Output on the screen, or
    a Value error results.

    If 'info.outputs' is non-empty, and if x, y, width, height are all
    zero, then the Monitor geometry will be dynamically defined to
    be the bounding box of the geometry of the active CRTCs
    associated with them.

    If 'name' matches an existing Monitor on the screen, the
    existing one will be deleted as if RRDeleteMonitor were called.

    For each output in 'info.outputs, each one is removed from all
    pre-existing Monitors. If removing the output causes the list of
    outputs for that Monitor to become empty, then that Monitor will
    be deleted as if RRDeleteMonitor were called.

    Only one monitor per screen may be primary. If 'info.primary'
    is true, then the primary value will be set to false on all
    other monitors on the screen.

    RRSetMonitor generates a ConfigureNotify event on the root
    window of the screen.

┌───
    RRDeleteMonitor
    window : WINDOW
    name: ATOM
└───
    Errors: Window, Atom, Value

    Deletes the named Monitor.

    'name' must be a valid atom or an Atom error results.

    'name' must match the name of a Monitor on the screen, or a
    Value error results.

    RRDeleteMonitor generates a ConfigureNotify event on the root
    window of the screen.

                  ❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧

17 Dec 2014 9:36am GMT

So kernel version 3.18 is out the door and it's time for our regular look at what's in the next merge window.
First looking at new hardware the big item is basic Skylake support. There are still a few smalls things missing, but mostly it's there now. This has been contributed by Damien, Satheeshakrishna and a lot of other folks. Looking at other platforms there has also been a lot of changes for vlv/chv: Improved backlight code, completely refactored interrupt handling to bring it in line with other platforms, rewritten panel power sequencing code, all from Ville. Rodrigo contributed PSR support for vlv/chv together with a lot of other fixes for PSR. Unfortunately it's not yet again enabled by default.

Moving on to Broadwell and the render side of things, Mika and Arun provided patches to improve the render workaround code and bring the set of workarounds up to date. execlist (the new command submission support on Gen8+) is also being polished with the addition of on-demand pinning of context objects with patches from Thomas Daniel and Oscar Mateo. Finally the RPS/render-turbo code has seen a lot of polish from Imre with a few fixes from Tom O'Rourke.

Otherwise not a lot of really big things happened on the GEM side: Just a few patches to fix issues in ppgtt (unfortunately still not enabled by default anywhere due to fun with context switches). And there's a bit of prep work and reorg all over for new stuff landing hopefully soon.

Looking at overall infrastructure changes the big thing certainly is the preparations for atomic display updates. The drm core/driver interface for atomic and all the helper library code to convert drivers has landed in 3.19, and already some conversions. On the Intel side it's been just prep work under the hood thus far with patches from Ander to precompute display PLL state. The new code to use vblank evades for pagelips has also landed, which is needed for atomic plane updates. And prep patches from Gustavo Padovan started to split the low-level plane update functions into check and commit steps. Lots more patches from different people are in flight and some have been merged for 3.20 already.

Besides these driver internal changes for atomic there has been other work to improve the codebase: Imre reorganized our handlers for suspend, resume and thawing and freezing. Jani reworked the audio and eld code which is the gfx side of the puzzle needed to make audio over HDMI or DP work. Jesse provided patches to track infoframes more accurately, which is needed to correctly fastboot (i.e. without modesets if possible) on external screens.

For older machines Ville has spent a few spare cycles to make them more useful: GPU reset support for gen3/4 should mitigate some of the recent chromium crashes on mesa, and the modeset code on i830M might work correctly for the first time, ever.


And of course the usual pile of smaller fixes and improvements all over.

Not directly related to code or features is the start of documenting i915 driver internals: With this release we now have some of the interrupt handling, fifo underrun reporting, frontbuffer tracking and runtime pm support newly document. And there's lots more in-flight, so hopefully soonish this will be fairly useful.

16 Dec 2014 9:03pm GMT

Those running Fedora Rawhide or GNOME 3.12 may have noticed that there is no Xorg.log file anymore. This is intentional, gdm now starts the X server so that it writes the log to the systemd journal. Update 29 Mar 2014: The X server itself has no capabilities for logging to the journal yet, but no changes to the X server were needed anyway. gdm merely starts the server with a /dev/null logfile and redirects stdin/stderr to the journal.

Thus, to get the log file use journalctl, not vim, cat, less, notepad or whatever your $PAGER was before.

This leaves us with the following commands.

journalctl -e _COMM=Xorg 

Which would conveniently show something like this:

Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "wacom"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Lenovo Optical USB Mouse: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Integrated Camera: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Sleep Button: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Video Bus: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Power Button: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (EE) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

The -e toggle jumps to the end and only shows 1000 lines, but that's usually enough. journalctl has a bunch more options described in the journalctl man page. Note the PID in square brackets though. You can easily limit the output to just that PID, which makes it ideal to attach to the log to a bug report.

journalctl _COMM=Xorg _PID=5438

Previously the server kept only a single backup log file around, so if you restarted twice after a crash, the log was gone. With the journal it's now easy to extract the log file from that crash five restarts ago. It's almost like the future is already here.

Update 16/12/2014: This post initially suggested to use journactl /usr/bin/Xorg. Using _COMM is path-independent.

Fedora 21

Added 16/12/2014: If you recently updated to/installed Fedora 21 you'll notice that the above command won't show anything. As part of the Xorg without root rights feature Fedora ships a wrapper script as /usr/bin/Xorg. This script eventually executes /usr/libexecs/Xorg.bin which is the actual X server binary. Thus, on Fedora 21 replace Xorg with Xorg.bin:

journalctl -e _COMM=Xorg.bin
journalctl _COMM=Xorg.bin _PID=5438

Note that we're looking into this so that in a few updates time we don't have a special command here.

16 Dec 2014 4:35am GMT

Present and Compositors

The current Present extension is pretty unfriendly to compositing managers, causing an extra frame of latency between the applications operation and the scanout buffer. Here's how I'm fixing that.

An extra frame of lag

When an application uses PresentPixmap, that operation is generally delayed until the next vblank interval. When using X without composting, this ensures that the operation will get started in the vblank interval, and, if the rendering operation is quick enough, you'll get the frame presented without any tearing.

When using a compositing manager, the operation is still delayed until the vblank interval. That means that the CopyArea and subsequent Damage event generation don't occur until the display has already started the next frame. The compositing manager receives the damage event and constructs a new frame, but it also wants to avoid tearing, so that frame won't get displayed immediately, instead it'll get delayed until the next frame, introducing the lag.

Copy now, complete later

While away from the keyboard this morning, I had a sudden idea -- what if we performed the CopyArea and generated Damage right when the PresentPixmap request was executed but delayed the PresentComplete event until vblank happened.

With the contents updated and damage delivered, the compositing manager can immediately start constructing a new scene for the upcoming frame. When that is complete, it can also use PresentPixmap (either directly or through OpenGL) to queue the screen update.

If it's fast enough, that will all happen before vblank and the application contents will actually appear at the desired time.

Now, at the appointed vblank time, the PresentComplete event will get delivered to the client, telling it that the operation has finished and that its contents are now on the screen. If the compositing manager was quick, this event won't even be a lie.

We'll be lying less often

Right now, the CopyArea, Damage and PresentComplete operations all happen after the vblank has passed. As the compositing manager delays the screen update until the next vblank, then every single PresentComplete event will have the wrong UST/MSC values in it.

With the CopyArea happening immediately, we've a pretty good chance that the compositing manager will get the application contents up on the screen at the target time. When this happens, the PresentComplete event will have the correct values in it.

How can we do better?

The only way to do better is to have the PresentComplete event generated when the compositing manager displays the frame. I've talked about how that should work, but it's a bit twisty, and will require changes in the compositing manager to report the association between their PresentPixmap request and the applications' PresentPixmap requests.

Where's the code

I've got a set of three patches, two of which restructure the existing code without changing any behavior and a final patch which adds this improvement. Comments and review are encouraged, as always!

git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/xserver.git present-compositor

13 Dec 2014 8:28am GMT

As the development window for GNOME 3.16 advances, I've been adding a few new developer features, selfishly, so I could use them in my own programs.

Connectivity support for applications

Picking up from where Dan Winship left off, we've merged support for application to detect the network availability, especially the "connected to a network but not to the Internet" case.

In glib/gio now, watch the value of the "connectivity" property in GNetworkMonitor.

Grilo automatic network awareness

This glib/gio feature allows us to show/hide Grilo sources from applications' view if they require Internet and LAN access to work. This should be landing very soon, once we've made the new feature optional based on the presence of the new GLib.

Totem

And finally, this means we'll soon be able to show a nice placeholder when no network connection is available, and there are no channels left.

Grilo Lua resources support

A long-standing request, GResources support has landed for Grilo Lua plugins. When a script is loaded, we'll look for a separate GResource file with ".gresource" as the suffix, and automatically load it. This means you can use a local icon for sources with the URL "resource:///org/gnome/grilo/foo.png". Your favourite Lua sources will soon have icons!

Grilo Opensubtitles plugin

The developers affected by this new feature may be a group of one, but if the group is ever to expand, it's the right place to do it. This new Grilo plugin will fetch the list of available text subtitles for specific videos, given their "hashes", which are now exported by Tracker.

GDK-Pixbuf enhancements

I can point you to the NEWS file for the latest version, but the main gains are that GIF animations won't eat all your memory, DPI metadata support in JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats, and, for image viewers, you can tell whether a TIFF file is multi-page to open it in a more capable viewer.

Batched inserts, and better filters in GOM

Does what it says on the tin. This is useful for populating the database quicker than through piecemeal inserts, it also means you don't need to chain inserts when inserting multiple items.

Mathieu also worked on fixing the priority of filters when building complex queries, as well as supporting more than 2 items in a filter ("foo OR bar OR baz" for example).

08 Dec 2014 10:55pm GMT

click here to jump to the instructions

Mice have an optical sensor that tells them how far they moved in "mickeys". Depending on the sensor, a mickey is anywhere between 1/100 to 1/8200 of an inch or less. The current "standard" resolution is 1000 DPI, but older mice will have 800 DPI, 400 DPI etc. Resolutions above 1200 DPI are generally reserved for gaming mice with (usually) switchable resolution and it's an arms race between manufacturers in who can advertise higher numbers.

HW manufacturers are cheap bastards so of course the mice don't advertise the sensor resolution. Which means that for the purpose of pointer acceleration there is no physical reference. That delta of 10 could be a millimeter of mouse movement or a nanometer, you just can't know. And if pointer acceleration works on input without reference, it becomes useless and unpredictable. That is partially intended, HW manufacturers advertise that a lower resolution will provide more precision while sniping and a higher resolution means faster turns while running around doing rocket jumps. I personally don't think that there's much difference between 5000 and 8000 DPI anymore, the mouse is so sensitive that if you sneeze your pointer ends up next to Philae. But then again, who am I to argue with marketing types.

For us, useless and unpredictable is bad, especially in the use-case of everyday desktops. To work around that, libinput 0.7 now incorporates the physical resolution into pointer acceleration. And to do that we need a database, which will be provided by udev as of systemd 218 (unreleased at the time of writing). This database incorporates the various devices and their physical resolution, together with their sampling rate. udev sets the resolution as the MOUSE_DPI property that we can read in libinput and use as reference point in the pointer accel code. In the simplest case, the entry lists a single resolution with a single frequency (e.g. "MOUSE_DPI=1000@125"), for switchable gaming mice it lists a list of resolutions with frequencies and marks the default with an asterisk ("MOUSE_DPI=400@50 800@50 *1000@125 1200@125"). And you can and should help us populate the database so it gets useful really quickly.

How to add your device to the database

We use udev's hwdb for the database list. The upstream file is in /usr/lib/udev/hwdb.d/70-mouse.hwdb, the ruleset to trigger a match is in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/70-mouse.rules. The easiest way to add a match is with the libevdev mouse-dpi-tool (version 1.3.2). Run it and follow the instructions. The output looks like this:

$ sudo ./tools/mouse-dpi-tool  /dev/input/event8
Mouse Lenovo Optical USB Mouse on /dev/input/event8
Move the device along the x-axis.
Pause 3 seconds before movement to reset, Ctrl+C to exit.
Covered distance in device units:      264 at frequency 125.0Hz |       |^C
Estimated sampling frequency: 125Hz
To calculate resolution, measure physical distance covered
and look up the matching resolution in the table below
      16mm     0.66in      400dpi
      11mm     0.44in      600dpi
       8mm     0.33in      800dpi
       6mm     0.26in     1000dpi
       5mm     0.22in     1200dpi
       4mm     0.19in     1400dpi
       4mm     0.17in     1600dpi
       3mm     0.15in     1800dpi
       3mm     0.13in     2000dpi
       3mm     0.12in     2200dpi
       2mm     0.11in     2400dpi

Entry for hwdb match (replace XXX with the resolution in DPI):
mouse:usb:v17efp6019:name:Lenovo Optical USB Mouse:
 MOUSE_DPI=XXX@125

Take those last two lines, add them to a local new file /etc/udev/hwdb.d/71-mouse.hwdb. Rebuild the hwdb, trigger it, and done:

$ sudo udevadm hwdb --update
$ sudo udevadm trigger /dev/input/event8

Leave out the device path if you're not on systemd 218 yet. Check if the property is set:

$ udevadm info /dev/input/event8 | grep MOUSE_DPI
E: MOUSE_DPI=1000@125

And that shows everything worked. Restart X/Wayland/whatever uses libinput and you're good to go. If it works, double-check the upstream instructions, then file a bug against systemd with those two lines and assign it to me.

Trackballs are a bit hard to measure like this, my suggestion is to check the manufacturer's website first for any resolution data.

Update 2014/12/06: trackball comment added, udevadm trigger comment for pre 218

06 Dec 2014 12:19am GMT