Solved devfs.rules not being applied but that was not the issue

[toddgl]

I recently upgraded from 14.3 to 15.1 and have had issues with my wifi mouse not working with xorg but since I use wayland swayfx display manager it is not a show stopper, but I would really like to resolve the problem - that is the mouse works in the console and swayfx but not in my fall back x11 window manager x11-wm/windowmaker


I think that the issue is my devfs.rules in that despite the devfs service running without errors the rules related to /dev/input are not being applied at boot or if I run
service devfs restart

cat /etc/devfs.rules
[localrules=10]
add path 'input*' mode 0775 group 5
add path 'input/*' mode 0660 group 5
add path 'ugen*' mode 0660 group 5
add path 'usb/*' mode 0660 group 5
add path 'usb' mode 0770 group 5
# Match any nested device nodes inside the usb directory:
add path 'usb/**' mode 0660 group 5

My /etc/rc.conf has the following call to devfs

# HOST RULES
devfs_system_ruleset="10"

I was expecting the devfs.rules to affect the /dev/input to give the operator group to have read write to it but this is not happening

ls -l /dev/input
total 0
crw-------  1 root wheel   0xd Aug  2 08:22 event0
crw-------  1 root wheel  0x1a Aug  2 08:13 event1
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d6 Aug  2 08:22 event10
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d7 Aug  2 08:22 event11
crw-------  1 root wheel  0x36 Aug  2 08:22 event2
crw-------  1 root wheel  0x3d Aug  2 08:22 event3
crw-------  1 root wheel  0xa6 Aug  2 08:22 event4
crw-------  1 root wheel  0xb2 Aug  2 08:22 event5
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d2 Aug  2 20:13 event6
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d3 Aug  2 08:22 event7
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d4 Aug  2 08:22 event8
crw-------  1 root wheel 0x1d5 Aug  2 20:13 event9

 

[toddgl]

The devfs rules turned out to be a read herring. The issue was that the FreeBSD’s libinput stack and the underlying evdev interface were failing to correctly categorise my Compx 2.4G wireless receiver as a pointer device. Instead of treating it like a standard mouse, the driver leaves it unmanaged, causing it to fail inside my Xorg session.

From the Xorg logs I discovered a hidden, system-wide configuration rule named Force Native Libinput Wireless Mouse was overriding my custom Xorg settings.
I eventually found it by

grep -rn "Force Native Libinput Wireless Mouse" /usr/local/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d//usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/driver-input.conf:8: Identifier "Force Native Libinput Wireless Mouse"

I edited

/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/driver-input.conf

buy finding the section "InputClass" that contains Identifier "Force Native Libinput Wireless Mouse" and a MatchUSBID line with an exclamation mark to explicitly exclude the Compx receiver from being forced into libinput.

My mouse now works in my WindowMaker as well as teh sway environments.