> I'd been telling people to use firejail as a temporary workaround to prevent > steam from seeing the hidraw device. Note that hid-nintendo sets the most > significant bit of the evdev's version number to allow userspace applications > to discern it from the default hid device. There's no current mechanism in > the driver to yield to userspace using hidraw, but I can look at what > hid-steam is currently doing to accomplish that. > > I guess the downside to that method is that any other process listening to > the controller's evdev events would cease to receive them (maybe a voice > chat program using one of the buttons as a push-to-talk hotkey or something > similar). > Does steam use hidraw for the sony dualshock controllers as well? If so, is > hid-sony doing anything special for that usecase? In hid-sony we are not doing anything like hid-steam is doing (no virtual extra hidraw device). I just don't know how I feel about mixing of evdev and hidraw. It just means userspace drivers are doing things behind the back of the real driver (unless you add a virtual hidraw driver like hid-steam). For Sony devices I'm not a big fan as our devices are very complex. Our devices tend to use a single output report (same report id) for rumble, audio and other types of data. When we will expose audio properly, a user space application doing hidraw will mess up audio streams and other behavior (e.g. power settings are also in the same hid report). I don't know a good way yet. Has the usage of EVIOCGRAB been explored? If I recall it was intended to claim exclusive access to a device at least for input. It is a way of avoiding of some of the issues for simpler devices. Virtual devices could work too, but I really dislike the extra complexity to hid drivers. Just in Sony case our driver for future devices will already be quite complex. If we really want virtual device support, I don't think it would scale to add it to every driver. Maybe there would be a generic way in the HID driver in which drivers can blacklist certain reports or hook into just certain requests or so. Thanks, Roderick
