New packages: 2022Q4 and upgrade notes

Matthew Dillon dillon at backplane.com
Mon Dec 5 18:41:16 PST 2022


A few more notes on the evdev and X upgrade.  It may not be as seamless as
prior upgrades were for folks, there are a few issues that you may need to
address:

(1) A pkg upgrade -f won't install xf86-input-evdev if it is not already
installed, so be sure to install this package if necessary.  If you do not
have any CorePointer or CoreKeyboard optioned devices in your xorg.conf, X
will auto-attach all keyboards and mice it finds via evdev.  This is
usually sufficient.

(2) X may wind up attaching to multiple devices representing the same
mouse, causing events to be doubled up.  X filters some of these, but mouse
movement can wind up looking greatly accelerated.   We pushed a fix to the
kernel's evdev driver to change the kern.evdev.rcpt_mask sysctl default
from 3 to 12, which basically tells evdev to only register mouse events
from hardware and not from the keyboard mux or sysmouse.  You can also set
this sysctl variable at run-time, old or new.

Your X may wind up attaching to multiple mice anyway... for example, it may
attach to evdev (/dev/input/event*) but also attach to /dev/sysmouse.   You
can determine this by looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log or by running ps to
get the PID of the Xorg process and doing 'fstat -p thatpid' and checking
to see which device descriptors X has open.   If the mouse is still wonky
you may have to take further steps.   X itself actually does filter
duplicate events fairly well so things are not quite as dire as they might
otherwise seem.  Still.

(3) Mouse acceleration may still be unacceptable.  There are two solutions
if it is.   First, try 'xset m 1 1' and if that is acceptable play with
xset m values to tune the mouse (for example, 'xset m 1 3' is common).  If
the mouse is still going too fast, though, you can use xinput to change the
scaling (including allowing scalings less than 1.0 which 'xset m' does not
support).   Run 'xinput' with no arguments to list the devices and then try
applying a transformation matrix to the mouse device or devices, like this
for example:

xinput set-prop "PixArt USB Optical Mouse" "Coordinate Transformation
Matrix" 0.5 0 0 0 0.5 0 0 0 1

This is a transformation matrix:

0.5 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.5 0.0
0.0 0.0 1.0

So the first 0.5 is the X axis scaling and the second 0.5 is the Y axis
scaling.

It may take a little messing around.

-Matt
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