LPC: Life after X [LWN.net]

LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 7, 2010 21:42 UTC (Sun) by zander76 (guest, #6889)
In reply to: LPC: Life after X by iabervon
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

Hey,

It seems like this solution is a little to close to the metal. I would be more inclined to deal with the actual event and not the keystroke. The data would be my concern and leave control of mouse/keyboards in the hands of the client itself. Perhaps I am missing a use case that would require that level.

Even in real time gaming I have graphics cached on the client and I only send information like position and direction type information to the server. The individual keystrokes and mouse events are handled completely on the client side. The results of their events are sent along the wire.

Ben

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LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 7, 2010 23:22 UTC (Sun) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think you're misunderstanding my proposed architecture; there's a daemon on the computer with the keyboard that decides which application should see a key press event when the user presses a key on that keyboard. That daemon may also provide keystroke events when the user interacts with an on-screen picture of a keyboard and omit keystrokes that have been configured to control the mouse pointer. For some touchpads, the daemon would map between what the hardware outputs (two fingers moving in a particular way) and what that gesture means (scroll up), so the touchpad behavior is consistent across applications.

If the application is remote, the devices it has opened on the machine it is running on simply proxy the devices that an application on the machine with the hardware would have opened; all of the "what does this particular output from this particular hardware" is dealt with on the machine with that hardware.

I think, in fact, that we agree on what should be done where, but the terms "client" and "server" are somewhat unclear in the context of online gaming in X; the "client" is the application, but there are things called "servers" both closer to the user and further away from the user, and all three programs depend on operating system services.