libinput and lid switch events

I merged a patchset from James Ye today to add support for switch events to libinput, specifically: lid switch events. This feature is scheduled for libinput 1.7.

First, what are switches and how are they different so keys? A key's state is transient with a neutral state of "key is up". The state itself is expected to change frequently. Switches don't always have a defined logical neutral state and the state changes only infrequently. This requires different handling in applications and thus libinput exposes a new interface (and capability) for switches.

The interface itself is trivial. A switch event has two properties, the switch type (e.g. "lid") and the switch state (on/off). See the libinput-debug-events source code for a simple code to print the state and type.

In libinput, we generally try to restrict ourselves to the cases we know how to handle. So in the first iteration, we'll support a single switch event: the lid switch. This is the toggle that changes when you close the lid on your laptop.

But libinput uses this internally too: touchpads are disabled automatically whenever the lid is closed. Indeed, this functionally was the main motivation for this patchset. On a number of devices, we get ghost touches when the lid is closed. Even though the touchpad is unreachable by the user interference with the screen still causes events, moving the pointer in unexpected ways and generally being a nuisance. Some trackpoints suffer from the same issue. But now that libinput knows about the lid switch it can transparently disable the touchpad whenever the lid is closed and thus discard the events.

Lid switches on some devices are unreliable. There are some devices where the lid is permanently closed and other devices where the lid can be closed, but we'll never see the open event. So we change behaviour based on a few factors. After all, no-one likes a dysfunctional touchpad because the lid switch is broken (if you do, seek help). For one, whenever we detect keyboard events while in logically closed state we'll assume that the lid is open after all and adjust state accordingly. Unless the lid switch is reliable, we don't sync the initial state. That's annoying for those who start libinput in closed mode, but it filters out all devices that set the lid switch to "on" and then never change again. On the Surface 3 devices we go even further: we know those devices needs a bit of hand-holding. So whenever we detect activity on the keyboard, we also write the EV_SW/SW_LID state to the device node, thus updating the kernel to be correct again (and thus help everyone else who may be listening).

The exact behaviours will likely change slightly over time as we have to deal with corner-cases one-by-one. But meanwhile, it's even easier for compositors to listen to switch events and users don't have to deal with ghost touches anymore. Many thanks to James Ye for implementing this.