Flatpak portals - how do they work?

I've been working on portals recently and one of the issues for me was that the documentation just didn't quite hit the sweet spot. At least the bits I found were either too high-level or too implementation-specific. So here's a set of notes on how a portal works, in the hope that this is actually correct.

First, Portals are supposed to be a way for sandboxed applications (flatpaks) to trigger functionality they don't have direct access too. The prime example: opening a file without the application having access to $HOME. This is done by the applications talking to portals instead of doing the functionality themselves.

There is really only one portal process: /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal, started as a systemd user service. That process owns a DBus bus name (org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop) and an object on that name (/org/freedesktop/portal/desktop). You can see that bus name and object with D-Feet, from DBus' POV there's nothing special about it. What makes it the portal is simply that the application running inside the sandbox can talk to that DBus name and thus call the various methods. Obviously the xdg-desktop-portal needs to run outside the sandbox to do its things.

There are multiple portal interfaces, all available on that one object. Those interfaces have names like org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser (to open/save files). The xdg-desktop-portal implements those interfaces and thus handles any method calls on those interfaces. So where an application is sandboxed, it doesn't implement the functionality itself, it instead calls e.g. the OpenFile() method on the org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser interface. Then it gets an fd back and can read the content of that file without needing full access to the file system.

Some interfaces are fully handled within xdg-desktop-portal. For example, the Camera portal checks a few things internally, pops up a dialog for the user to confirm access to if needed [1] but otherwise there's nothing else involved with this specific method call.

Other interfaces have a backend "implementation" DBus interface. For example, the org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser interface has a org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser (notice the "impl") counterpart. xdg-desktop-portal does not implement those impl.portals. xdg-desktop-portal instead routes the DBus calls to the respective "impl.portal". Your sandboxed application calls OpenFile(), xdg-desktop-portal now calls OpenFile() on org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser. That interface returns a value, xdg-desktop-portal extracts it and returns it back to the application in respones to the original OpenFile() call.

What provides those impl.portals doesn't matter to xdg-desktop-portal, and this is where things are hot-swappable. GTK and Qt both provide (some of) those impl portals, There are GTK and Qt-specific portals with xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and xdg-desktop-portal-kde but another one is provided by GNOME Shell directly. You can check the files in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/ and see which impl portal is provided on which bus name. The reason those impl.portals exist is so they can be native to the desktop environment - regardless what application you're running and with a generic xdg-desktop-portal, you see the native file chooser dialog for your desktop environment.

So the full call sequence is:

• At startup, xdg-desktop-portal parses the /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal/*.portal files to know which impl.portal interface is provided on which bus name
• The application calls OpenFile() on the org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser interface on the object path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop. It can do so because the bus name this object sits on is not restricted by the sandbox
• xdg-desktop-portal receives that call. This is portal with an impl.portal so xdg-desktop-portal calls OpenFile() on the bus name that provides the org.freedesktop.impl.portal.FileChooser interface (as previously established by reading the *.portal files)
• Assuming xdg-desktop-portal-gtk provides that portal at the moment, that process now pops up a GTK FileChooser dialog that runs outside the sandbox. User selects a file
• xdg-desktop-portal-gtk sends back the fd for the file to the xdg-desktop-portal, and the impl.portal parts are done
• xdg-desktop-portal receives that fd and sends it back as reply to the OpenFile() method in the normal portal
• The application receives the fd and can read the file now

A few details here aren't fully correct, but it's correct enough to understand the sequence - the exact details depend on the method call anyway.

Finally: because of DBus restrictions, the various methods in the portal interfaces don't just reply with values. Instead, the xdg-desktop-portal creates a new org.freedesktop.portal.Request object and returns the object path for that. Once that's done the method is complete from DBus' POV. When the actual return value arrives (e.g. the fd), that value is passed via a signal on that Request object, which is then destroyed. This roundabout way is done for purely technical reasons, regular DBus methods would time out while the user picks a file path.

Anyway. Maybe this helps someone understanding how the portal bits fit together.

[1] it does so using another portal but let's ignore that
[2] not really hot-swappable though. You need to restart xdg-desktop-portal but not your host. So luke-warm-swappable only

Edit Sep 01: clarify that it's not GTK/Qt providing the portals, but xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and -kde

libei - a status update

A year ago, I first announced libei - a library to support emulated input. After an initial spurt of development, it was left mostly untouched until a few weeks ago. Since then, another flurry of changes have been added, including some initial integration into GNOME's mutter. So, let's see what has changed.

A Recap

First, a short recap of what libei is: it's a transport layer for emulated input events to allow for any application to control the pointer, type, etc. But, unlike the XTEST extension in X, libei allows the compositor to be in control over clients, the devices they can emulate and the input events as well. So it's safer than XTEST but also a lot more flexible. libei already supports touch and smooth scrolling events, something XTest doesn't have or is struggling with.

Terminology refresher: libei is the client library (used by an application wanting to emulate input), EIS is the Emulated Input Server, i.e. the part that typically runs in the compositor.

Server-side Devices

So what has changed recently: first, the whole approach has flipped on its head - now a libei client connects to the EIS implementation and "binds" to the seats the EIS implementation provides. The EIS implementation then provides input devices to the client. In the simplest case, that's just a relative pointer but we have capabilities for absolute pointers, keyboards and touch as well. Plans for the future is to add gestures and tablet support too. Possibly joysticks, but I haven't really thought about that in detail yet.

So basically, the initial conversation with an EIS implementation goes like this:

• Client: Hello, I am $NAME
• Server: Hello, I have "seat0" and "seat1"
• Client: Bind to "seat0" for pointer, keyboard and touch
• Server: Here is a pointer device
• Server: Here is a keyboard device
• Client: Send relative motion event 10/2 through the pointer device

Notice how the touch device is missing? The capabilities the client binds to are just what the client wants, the server doesn't need to actually give the client a device for that capability.

One of the design choices for libei is that devices are effectively static. If something changes on the EIS side, the device is removed and a new device is created with the new data. This applies for example to regions and keymaps (see below), so libei clients need to be able to re-create their internal states whenever the screen or the keymap changes.

Device Regions

Devices can now have regions attached to them, also provided by the EIS implementation. These regions define areas reachable by the device and are required for clients such as Barrier. On a dual-monitor setup you may have one device with two regions or two devices with one region (representing one monitor), it depends on the EIS implementation. But either way, as libei client you will know that there is an area and you will know how to reach any given pixel on that area. Since the EIS implementation decides the regions, it's possible to have areas that are unreachable by emulated input (though I'm struggling a bit for a real-world use-case).

So basically, the conversation with an EIS implementation goes like this:

• Client: Hello, I am $NAME
• Server: Hello, I have "seat0" and "seat1"
• Client: Bind to "seat0" for absolute pointer
• Server: Here is an abs pointer device with regions 1920x1080@0,0, 1080x1920@1920,0
• Server: Here is an abs pointer device with regions 1920x1080@0,0
• Server: Here is an abs pointer device with regions 1080x1920@1920,0
• Client: Send abs position 100/100 through the second device

Notice how we have three absolute devices? A client emulating a tablet that is mapped to a screen could just use the third device. As with everything, the server decides what devices are created and the clients have to figure out what they want to do and how to do it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of regions make libei clients windowing-system independent. The Barrier EI support WIP no longer has any Wayland-specific code in it. In theory, we could implement EIS in the X server and libei clients would work against that unmodified.

Keymap handling

The keymap handling has been changed so the keymap too is provided by the EIS implementation now, effectively in the same way as the Wayland compositor provides the keymap to Wayland clients. This means a client knows what keycodes to send, it can handle the state to keep track of things, etc. Using Barrier as an example again - if you want to generate an "a", you need to look up the keymap to figure out which keycode generates an A, then you can send that through libei to actually press the key.

Admittedly, this is quite messy. XKB (and specifically libxkbcommon) does not make it easy to go from a keysym to a key code. The existing Barrier X code is full of corner-cases with XKB already, I espect those to be necessary for the EI support as well.

Scrolling

Scroll events have four types: pixel-based scrolling, discrete scrolling, and scroll stop/cancel events. The first should be obvious, discrete scrolling is for mouse wheels. It uses the same 120-based API that Windows (and the kernel) use, so it's compatible with high-resolution wheel mice. The scroll stop event notifies an EIS implementation that the scroll interaction has stopped (e.g. lifting fingers off) which in turn may start kinetic scrolling - just like the libinput/Wayland scroll stop events. The scroll cancel event notifies the EIS implementation that scrolling really has stopped and no kinetic scrolling should be triggered. There's no equivalent in libinput/Wayland for this yet but it helps to get the hook in place.

Emulation "Transactions"

This has fairly little functional effect, but interactions with an EIS server are now sandwiched in a start/stop emulating pair. While this doesn't matter for one-shot tools like xdotool, it does matter for things like Barrier which can send the start emulating event when the pointer enters the local window. This again allows the EIS implementation to provide some visual feedback to the user. To correct the example from above, the sequence is actually:

• ...
• Server: Here is a pointer device
• Client: Start emulating
• Client: Send relative motion event 10/2 through the pointer device
• Client: Send relative motion event 1/4 through the pointer device
• Client: Stop emulating

Properties

Finally, there is now a generic property API, something copied from PipeWire. Properties are simple key/value string pairs and cover those things that aren't in the immediate API. One example here: the portal can set things like "ei.application.appid" to the Flatpak's appid. Properties can be locked down and only libei itself can set properties before the initial connection. This makes them reliable enough for the EIS implementation to make decisions based on their values. Just like with PipeWire, the list of useful properties will grow over time. it's too early to tell what is really needed.

Repositories

Now, for the actual demo bits: I've added enough support to Barrier, XWayland, Mutter and GNOME Shell that I can control a GNOME on Wayland session through Barrier (note: the controlling host still needs to run X since we don't have the ability to capture input events under Wayland yet). The keymap handling in Barrier is nasty but it's enough to show that it can work.

GNOME Shell has a rudimentary UI, again just to show what works:

The status icon shows ... if libei clients are connected, it changes to !!! while the clients are emulating events. Clients are listed by name and can be disconnected at will. I am not a designer, this is just a PoC to test the hooks.

Note how xdotool is listed in this screenshot: that tool is unmodified, it's the XWayland libei implementation that allows it to work and show up correctly

The various repositories are in the "wip/ei" branch of:

• XWayland
• Barrier
• Mutter
• GNOME Shell

And of course libei itself.

Where to go from here? The last weeks were driven by rapid development, so there's plenty of test cases to be written to make sure the new code actually works as intended. That's easy enough. Looking at the Flatpak integration is another big ticket item, once the portal details are sorted all the pieces are (at least theoretically) in place. That aside, improving the integrations into the various systems above is obviously what's needed to get this working OOTB on the various distributions. Right now it's all very much in alpha stage and I could use help with all of those (unless you're happy to wait another year or so...). Do ping me if you're interested to work on any of this.

It's templates all the way down - part 4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

After getting thouroughly nerd-sniped a few weeks back, we now have FreeBSD support through qemu in the freedesktop.org ci-templates. This is possible through the qemu image generation we have had for quite a while now. So let's see how we can easily add a FreeBSD VM (or other distributions) to our gitlab CI pipeline:

.freebsd:
  variables:
     FDO_DISTRIBUTION_VERSION: '13.0'
     FDO_DISTRIBUTION_TAG: 'freebsd.0' # some value for humans to read
     
build-image:
  extends:
     - .freebsd
     - .fdo.qemu-build@freebsd
  variables:
    FDO_DISTRIBUTION_PACKAGES: "curl wget"

Now, so far this may all seem quite familiar. And indeed, this is almost exactly the same process as for normal containers (see Part 1), the only difference is the .fdo.qemu-build base template. Using this template means we build an image babushka: our desired BSD image is actual a QEMU RAW image sitting inside another generic container image. That latter image only exists to start the QEMU image and set up the environment if need be, you don't need to care what distribution it runs out (Fedora for now).

Because of the nesting, we need to handle this accordingly in our script: tag for the actual test job - we need to start the image and make sure our jobs are actually built within. The templates set up an ssh alias "vm" for this and the vmctl script helps to do things on the vm:

test-build:
  extends:
    - .freebsd
    - .fdo.distribution-image@freebsd
  script:
    # start our QEMU image
    - /app/vmctl start
    
    # copy our current working directory to the VM
    # (this is a yaml multiline command to work around the colon)
    - |
      scp -r $PWD vm:
      
    # Run the build commands on the VM and if they succeed, create a .success file
    - /app/vmctl exec "cd $CI_PROJECT_NAME; meson builddir; ninja -C builddir" && touch .success || true
    
    # Copy results back to our run container so we can include them in artifacts:
    - |
      scp -r vm:$CI_PROJECT_NAME/builddir .
      
    # kill the VM
    - /app/vmctl stop
    
    # Now that we have cleaned up: if our build job before
    # failed, exit with an error
    - [[ -e .success ]] || exit 1

Now, there's a bit to unpack but with the comments above it should be fairly obvious what is happening. We start the VM, copy our working directory over and then run a command on the VM before cleaning up. The reason we use touch .success is simple: it allows us to copy things out and clean up before actually failing the job.

Obviously, if you want to build any other distribution you just swap the freebsd out for fedora or whatever - the process is the same. libinput has been using fedora qemu images for ages now.

libinput and hold gestures

Thanks to the work done by Josè Expòsito, libinput 1.19 will ship with a new type of gesture: Hold Gestures. So far libinput supported swipe (moving multiple fingers in the same direction) and pinch (moving fingers towards each other or away from each other). These gestures are well-known, commonly used, and familiar to most users. For example, GNOME 40 recently has increased its use of touchpad gestures to switch between workspaces, etc. Swipe and pinch gestures require movement, it was not possible (for callers) to detect fingers on the touchpad that don't move.

This gap is now filled by Hold gestures. These are triggered when a user puts fingers down on the touchpad, without moving the fingers. This allows for some new interactions and we had two specific ones in mind: hold-to-click, a common interaction on older touchscreen interfaces where holding a finger in place eventually triggers the context menu. On a touchpad, a three-finger hold could zoom in, or do dictionary lookups, or kill a kitten. Whatever matches your user interface most, I guess.

The second interaction was the ability to stop kinetic scrolling. libinput does not actually provide kinetic scrolling, it merely provides the information needed in the client to do it there: specifically, it tells the caller when a finger was lifted off a touchpad at the end of a scroll movement. It's up to the caller (usually: the toolkit) to implement the kinetic scrolling effects. One missing piece was that while libinput provided information about lifting the fingers, it didn't provide information about putting fingers down again later - a common way to stop scrolling on other systems.

Hold gestures are intended to address this: a hold gesture triggered after a flick with two fingers can now be used by callers (read: toolkits) to stop scrolling.

Now, one important thing about hold gestures is that they will generate a lot of false positives, so be careful how you implement them. The vast majority of interactions with the touchpad will trigger some movement - once that movement hits a certain threshold the hold gesture will be cancelled and libinput sends out the movement events. Those events may be tiny (depending on touchpad sensitivity) so getting the balance right for the aforementioned hold-to-click gesture is up to the caller.

As usual, the required bits to get hold gestures into the wayland protocol are either in the works, mid-flight or merge-ready so expect this to hit the various repositories over the medium-term future.

A pre-supplied "custom" keyboard layout for X11

Last year I wrote about how to create a user-specific XKB layout, followed by a post explaining that this won't work in X. But there's a pandemic going on, which is presumably the only reason people haven't all switched to Wayland yet. So it was time to figure out a workaround for those still running X.

This Merge Request (scheduled for xkeyboard-config 2.33) adds a "custom" layout to the evdev.xml and base.xml files. These XML files are parsed by the various GUI tools to display the selection of available layouts. An entry in there will thus show up in the GUI tool.

Our rulesets, i.e. the files that convert a layout/variant configuration into the components to actually load already have wildcard matching [1]. So the custom layout will resolve to the symbols/custom file in your XKB data dir - usually /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/custom.

This file is not provided by xkeyboard-config. It can be created by the user though and whatever configuration is in there will be the "custom" keyboard layout. Because xkeyboard-config does not supply this file, it will not get overwritten on update.

From XKB's POV it is just another layout and it thus uses the same syntax. For example, to override the +/* key on the German keyboard layout with a key that produces a/b/c/d on the various Shift/Alt combinations, use this:

default
xkb_symbols "basic" {
    include "de(basic)"
    key <AD12>  { [      a,   b,   c,  d ]      };
};

This example includes the "basic" section from the symbols/de file (i.e. the default German layout), then overrides the 12th alphanumeric key from left in the 4th row from bottom (D) with the given symbols. I'll leave it up to the reader to come up with a less useful example.

There are a few drawbacks:

• If the file is missing and the user selects the custom layout, the results are... undefined. For run-time configuration like GNOME it doesn't really matter - the layout compilation fails and you end up with the one the device already had (i.e. the default one built into X, usually the US layout).
• If the file is missing and the custom layout is selected in the xorg.conf, the results are... undefined. I tested it and ended up with the US layout but that seems more by accident than design. My recommendation is to not do that.
• No variants are available in the XML files, so the only accessible section is the one marked default.
• If a commandline tool uses a variant of custom, the GUI will not reflect this. If the GUI goes boom, that's a bug in the GUI.

So overall, it's a hack[2]. But it's a hack that fixes real user issues and given we're talking about X, I doubt anyone notices another hack anyway.

[1] If you don't care about GUIs, setxkbmap -layout custom -variant foobar has been possible for years.
[2] Sticking with the UNIX principle, it's a hack that fixes the issue at hand, is badly integrated, and weird to configure.

Auto-updating XKB for new kernel keycodes

Your XKB keymap contains two important parts. One is the mapping from the hardware scancode to some internal representation, for example:

  <AB10> = 61;  

Which basically means Alphanumeric key in row B (from bottom), 10th key from the left. In other words: the /? key on a US keyboard.

The second part is mapping that internal representation to a keysym, for example:

  key <AB10> {        [     slash,    question        ]       }; 

This is the actual layout mapping - once in place this key really produces a slash or question mark (on level2, i.e. when Shift is down).

This two-part approach exists so either part can be swapped without affecting the other. Swap the second part to an exclamation mark and paragraph symbol and you have the French version of this key, swap it to dash/underscore and you have the German version of the key - all without having to change the keycode.

Back in the golden days of everyone-does-what-they-feel-like, keyboard manufacturers (presumably happily so) changed the key codes and we needed model-specific keycodes in XKB. The XkbModel configuration is a leftover from these trying times.

The Linux kernel's evdev API has largely done away with this. It provides a standardised set of keycodes, defined in linux/input-event-codes.h, and ensures, with the help of udev [0], that all keyboards actually conform to that. An evdev XKB keycode is a simple "kernel keycode + 8" [1] and that applies to all keyboards. On top of that, the kernel uses semantic definitions for the keys as they'd be in the US layout. KEY_Q is the key that would, behold!, produce a Q. Or an A in the French layout because they just have to be different, don't they? Either way, with evdev the Xkb Model configuration largely points to nothing and only wastes a few cycles with string parsing.

The second part, the keysym mapping, uses two approaches. One is to use a named #define like the "slash", "question" outlined above (see X11/keysymdef.h for the defines). The other is to use unicode directly like this example from  the Devangari layout:

  key <AB10> { [ U092f, U095f, slash, question ] };

As you can see, mix and match is available too. Using Unicode code points of course makes the layouts less immediately readable but on the other hand we don't need to #define the whole of Unicode. So from a maintenance perspective it's a win.

However, there's a third type of key that we care about: functional keys. Those are the multimedia (historically: "internet") keys that most devices have these days. Volume up, touchpad on/off, cycle display connectors, etc. Those keys are special in that they don't have a Unicode representation and they are always mapped to the same fixed functionality. Even Dvorak users want their volume keys to do what it says on the key.

Because they have no Unicode code points, those keys are defined, historically, in XF86keysyms.h:

  #define XF86XK_MonBrightnessUp    0x1008FF02  /* Monitor/panel brightness */

And mapping a key like this looks like this [2]:

  key <I21>   {       [ XF86Calculator        ] };

The only drawback: every key needs to be added manually. This has been done for some, but not for others. And some keys were added with different names than what the kernel uses [3].

So we're in this weird situation where we have a flexible keymap system  but the kernel already tells us what a key does anyway and we don't want to change that. Virtually all keys added in the last decade or so falls into that group of keys, but to actually make use of them requires a #define in xorgproto and an update to the keycodes and symbols in xkeyboard-config. That again introduces discrepancies and we end up in the situation where we're at right now: some keys don't work until someone files a bug, and then the users still need to wait for several components to be released and those releases trickle into the distributions.

10 years ago would've been a good time to make this more efficient. The situation wasn't that urgent then, most of the kernel keycodes added are >255 which means they cannot be used in X anyway. [4] The second best time to do it is now. What we need is basically a pass-through from kernel code to symbol and that's currently sitting in various MRs:

- xkeyboard-config can generate the keycodes/evdev file based on the list of kernel keycodes, so all kernel keycodes are mapped to internal representations by default

- xorgproto has reserved a range within the XF86 keysym reserved range for pass-through mappings, i.e. any KEY_FOO define from the kernel is mapped to XF86XK_Foo with a specific value [5]. The #define format is fixed so it can be parsed.

- xkeyboard-config parses theses XF86 keysyms and sets up a keysym mapping in the default keymap.

This is semi-automatic, i.e. there are helper scripts that detect changes and notify us, hooked into the CI, but the actual work must be done manually. These keysyms immediately become set-in-stone API so we don't want some unsupervised script to go wild on them.

There's a huge backlog of keys to be added (dating to kernels pre-v3.18) and I'll go through them one-by-one over the next weeks to make sure they're correct. But eventually they'll be done and we have a full keymap for all kernel keys to be immediately available in the XKB layout.

The last part of all of this is a calendar reminder for me to do this after every new kernel release. Let's hope this crucial part isn't the first to fail.

[0] 60-keyboard.hwdb has a mere ~1800 lines!
[1] Historical reasons, you don't want to know. *jedi wave*
[2] the XK_ part of the key name is dropped, implementation detail.
[3] This can also happen when a kernel define is renamed/aliased but we cannot easily do so for this header.
[4] X has an 8 bit keycode limit and that won't change until someone develops XKB2 with support for 32-bit keycodes, i.e. never.
[5] The actual value is an implementation detail and no client must care

Parsing HID Unit Items

This post explains how to parse the HID Unit Global Item as explained by the HID Specification, page 37. The table there is quite confusing and it took me a while to fully understand it (Benjamin Tissoires was really the one who cracked it). I couldn't find any better explanation online which means either I'm incredibly dense and everyone's figured it out or no-one has posted a better explanation. On the off-chance it's the latter [1], here are the instructions on how to parse this item.

We know a HID Report Descriptor consists of a number of items that describe the content of each HID Report (read: an event from a device). These Items include things like Logical Minimum/Maximum for axis ranges, etc. A HID Unit item specifies the physical unit to apply. For example, a Report Descriptor may specify that X and Y axes are in mm which can be quite useful for all the obvious reasons.

Like most HID items, a HID Unit Item consists of a one-byte item tag and 1, 2 or 4 byte payload. The Unit item in the Report Descriptor itself has the binary value 0110 01nn where the nn is either 1, 2, or 3 indicating 1, 2 or 4 bytes of payload, respectively. That's standard HID.

The payload is divided into nibbles (4-bit units) and goes from LSB to MSB. The lowest-order 4 bits (first byte & 0xf) define the unit System to apply: one of SI Linear, SI Rotation, English Linear or English Rotation (well, or None/Reserved). The rest of the nibbles are in this order: "length", "mass", "time", "temperature", "current", "luminous intensity". In something resembling code this means:

 system = value & 0xf
 length_exponent = (value & 0xf0) >> 4
 mass_exponent   = (value & 0xf00) >> 8
 time_exponent   = (value & 0xf000) >> 12
 ...
 

The System defines which unit is used for length (e.g. SILinear means length is in cm). The actual value of each nibble is the exponent for the unit in use [2]. In something resembling code:

 switch (system)
   case SILinear: 
     print("length is in cm^{length_exponent}"); 
     break;
   case SIRotation: 
     print("length is in rad^{length_exponent}");
     break;
   case EnglishLinear: 
     print("length is in in^{length_exponent}");
     break;
   case EnglishRotation:
     print("length is in deg^{length_exponent}");
     break;
   case None:
   case Reserved"
     print("boo!");
     break;
 

For example, the value 0x321 means "SI Linear" (0x1) so the remaining nibbles represent, in ascending nibble order: Centimeters, Grams, Seconds, Kelvin, Ampere, Candela. The length nibble has a value of 0x2 so it's square cm, the mass nibble has a value of 0x3 so it is cubic grams (well, it's just an example, so...). This means that any report containing this item comes in cm²g³. As a more realistic example: 0xF011 would be cm/s.

If we changed the lowest nibble to English Rotation (0x4), i.e. our value is now 0x324, the units represent: Degrees, Slug, Seconds, F, Ampere, Candela [3]. The length nibble 0x2 means square degrees, the mass nibble is cubic slugs. As a more realistic example, 0xF014 would be degrees/s.

Any nibble with value 0 means the unit isn't in use, so the example from the spec with value 0x00F0D121 is SI linear, units cm² g s⁻³ A⁻¹, which is... Voltage! Of course you knew that and totally didn't have to double-check with wikipedia.

Because bits are expensive and the base units are of course either too big or too small or otherwise not quite right, HID also provides a Unit Exponent item. The Unit Exponent item (a separate item to Unit in the Report Descriptor) then describes the exponent to be applied to the actual value in the report. For example, a Unit Eponent of -3 means 10⁻³ to be applied to the value. If the report descriptor specifies an item of Unit 0x00F0D121 (i.e. V) and Unit Exponent -3, the value of this item is mV (milliVolt), Unit Exponent of 3 would be kV (kiloVolt).

Now, in hindsight all this is pretty obvious and maybe even sensible. It'd have been nice if the spec would've explained it a bit clearer but then I would have nothing to write about, so I guess overall I call it a draw.

[1] This whole adventure was started because there's a touchpad out there that measures touch pressure in radians, so at least one other person out there struggled with the docs...
[2] The nibble value is twos complement (i.e. it's a signed 4-bit integer). Values 0x1-0x7 are exponents 1 to 7, values 0x8-0xf are exponents -8 to -1.
[3] English Linear should've trolled everyone and use Centimetres instead of Centimeters in SI Linear.