Created attachment 337793 [details] Patch to split the combo xen virtual keyboard/pointer device into two virtual devices Description of problem: While its possible to configure the X server to use the Xen virtual keyboard and mouse combination device (see other bugs referenced in the next comment) it is fraught with problems because the X server only half-believes that you can have a device that is both a keyboard and a mouse. In particular you must have exactly one CorePointer and one CoreKeyboard and, although this is not stated explicitly, they cannot be the same device. It gets worse, though, because the Xen virtual keyboard (which is also a pointer) must have exactly the same Xkb configuration as the normal keyboard because which Xkb settings are on a per-device basis, this isn't reflected through utilities like setxkbmap. There's more detail in the bugs I'm about to enter and refer to later. Later kernels, for example, Fedora 9's kernel, split the virtual keyboard and pointer into two separate devices. This makes configuration much easier and doesn't run into logical problems with the X server configuration. Having said that, this is a "nice to have" because we can configure the Xen pointer and keyboard combo device in a way that is transparent to most users. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):kernel-xenU-2.6.18-128 (and other, earlier kernels). How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attempt to configure the Xen virtual pointer so that you get proper mouse tracking in a Xen guest VNC console. Actual results: Without fixing xorg-x11-input-evdev, xkeyboard-config and rhpl and rhpxl to understand more of this combo device you can't do this. Well, you can, so long as you don't mind losing either the keyboard or the mouse or sometimes both. Expected results: With the xorg-x11-drv-evdev this should be a piece of cake, but it's not because the evdev driver wants to be both a keyboard and a mouse and this confuses X. Additional info: I've attached a patch which does the trick. But see also the rhpl, rhpxl, xkeyboard-config and xorg-x11-drv-evdev patches.
Related bugs: bug 493618, bug 493623, bug 493627, bug 493630, bug 493634 and bug 493642
The bug as reported is about the difficulties to manually configure X in a certain way, to get proper pointer tracking. It is certainly valid. However, the real problem users care about is that pointer tracking works very poorly (mouse hits invisible wall). Upstram, we solved the problem by fixing numerous issues in various places to make it work out of the box, from Fedora 11 on. The patches proposed by the reporter solve the problem by making manual configuration work. They are unrelated to the upstream solution. Like the upstream solution, they're fairly invasive: they touch the kernel and several user space packages. This is a significant risk. Moreover, splitting the device is an ABI change. The question is whether there are benefits to justify that. We already put much less invasive changes into 5.4 to improve pointer tracking (bug 492866). They fix the "mouse hits invisible wall" problem. They still require a pointer grab, which virt-viewer makes relatively painless. So, the benefit of the proposed patches over what we've got already is to enable manual configuration so that the mouse grab can be avoided. While that's certainly nice, it doesn't justify the risk, in my opinion. If you disagree, please reopen the bug. Some technical background: There are 3 pieces in the stack: VNC client, QEMU VNC server and the guest's X. The old, misbehaving setup has VNC client sending absolute coordinates, which the VNC server sends through xenkbd to X. X in RHEL-5 doesn't have any auto-configuration of input devices, so it just opens /dev/input/mice, and thus the guest kernel converts from absolute to relative. Because the VNC client has no knowledge of this conversion, you get into situation where you hit an invisible wall in the client when it thinks it has got to the virtual desktop boundary. Now, if you had absolute coordinates being passed and used all the way to X then it would trivially work, but this requires X configuration. Recent X's do that automatically. RHEL-5's X simply isn't capable of that. The patches proposed by the reporter add manual configuration steps across a wide range of RPMs. The fix we did for RHEL-5.4 is to make xenkbd *not* use absolute coordinates, so the VNC server now sends relative coordinates. This removes the broken absolute -> relative conversion in the guest kernel. On its own this isn't sufficient, because you then get broken absolute to relative conversion in the VNC server instead. So we also added the VNC relative mouse extension to QEMU and GTK-VNC. Now the VNC client is in charge of doing the absolute -> relative conversion. This is good, as this is the only point in the stack capable of doing the conversion correctly, to avoid hitting an invisible wall. The only restriction is that you must grab the host mouse pointer and hide it, so you only see the guest drawn pointer.
By the way, RHEL-6 pointer tracking will be fine out of the box using absolute coordinates, just like upstream.