wiki/gofurther/evdev.md

title	description	published	date	tags	editor	dateCreated
Share an input device with a guest using evdev		true	2023-05-13T15:04:02.628Z		markdown	2022-08-13T00:26:02.801Z

Share an input device

In this section, we focus on sharing a locally attached input device with a guest virtual machine.

Event device

Libvirt offers a low-latency way to share an input device device with a local virtual machine, using the linux evdev event interface.

Event device or simply evdev is a generic input event interface that is part of the Linux kernel.

The following is an XML snippet example for sharing a mouse and a keyboard.

<input type='evdev'>
      <source dev='/dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-1-event-mouse/'>
</input>
<input type='evdev'>
      <source dev='/dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd' grab='all' repeat='on'/>
</input>

Replace the platform-i8042-serio-1-event-mouse value with the value under /dev/input/by-path/* or /dev/input/by-id/*

If there are multiple possible options, the input device has to have event in the name.

# cat /dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:09:00.0-event-mouse

<EFBFBD><EFBFBD>c      $
<0A><>c<EFBFBD><63><EFBFBD>c<EFBFBD><63><EFBFBD>c<EFBFBD>$<24><>c<EFBFBD>$<24><>c׏<63><D78F>c׏<63><D78F>c                                             

Virtio-input

Input grabbing on Wayland doesn't currently work as expected using Spice or VNC. Destkop environments based on the X session manager may work better. {.is-warning}