Tagged by udev as: mouse

I'm excited about the kernel evdev support in FreeBSD and the prospect of having a more plug'n'play experience with peripherals like USB input devices. But things aren't working as expected.

I have tried two laptops where the touchpad works to move the mouse cursor, and the buttons for the pad work, but features like tap to click or two-finger scrolling do not. KDE Plasma's Touchpad settings says that a touchpad is not detected.

I also have three USB game controllers I've tried to get working. I have a PDP Xbox One controller, a Microsoft Xbox 360 controller, and a Logitech Dual Action controller. I've tried using webcamd, and it sets up the controllers with /dev/input/event7 devices, but in KDE the only thing that happens is that the left joystick moves the mouse cursor. I also tried the iichid port. Without need of webcamd, it will also create /dev/input/event* devices for the USB game controllers. But with it, I get the same behavior: KDE doesn't recognize that a joystick is present, and the left joystick moves the mouse cursor.

But I noticed something interesting in /var/log/Xorg.0.log which makes me believe that the touchpad and USB game controller issues are related. For all of those device entries, there is a line which says "tagged by udev as: mouse". The other devices like the keyboard are tagged correctly.

Udev is capable of tagging peripherals as touchpads or joysticks as well as keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and so on. So apparently there is a problem with udev's detection of these kinds of devices on FreeBSD. Unless there's something else involved that I'm unaware of, I'm suspecting a problem with libudev-devd (unless there is something more fundamental wrong with the kernel's evdev support).

Is there a way to force udev to tag certain devices in a certain way, overriding autodetection? I suspect that my touchpads and USB game controllers would work as expected if they were correctly tagged by udev.
 
I had this issue, but installing xf86-input-evdev and xf86-input-synaptics

and then loading synaptics with

Code:
/boot/loader.conf
hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"
hw.psm.trackpoint_support="1"

I found it was auto-detected correctly. I don't know your laptop, but the trackpoint part is ThinkPad and may not be applicable.

The USB game controller you might get more attention in Multimedia/Games, and there are some previous threads like Thread 431425
 
Hello, I'm not sure whether to bump this thread or create a new one because I am having a very similar issue, I went for the former because it seems more appropriate.
The solution above did not work.

My problem​

I am trying to configure my touchpad to use two finger scrolling and right click with two finger tap, normally I do this through the GUI in MATE (Other DEs have similar settings), however MATE settings does not detect any touchpads at all.
So I tried configuring it with a file in xorg.conf.d:
Code:
$ cat /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-touchpad.conf 
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Touchpad"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    Driver "libinput"
    Option "Tapping" "on"
    Option "AccelSpeed" "0.5"
    Option "DisableWhileTyping" "true"
    Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
    Option "Gesture" "true"
    Option "ScrollMethod" "two-finger"
EndSection
However this did not have any effects, after some investigation, it turns out my touchpad is being detected as a mouse:
Code:
$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ System mouse                                id=7    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SIGMACHIP Usb Mouse                         id=10    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse                 id=11    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                       id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard                 id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ System keyboard multiplexer                 id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                                id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT keyboard                                 id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
SYNA2B4C is my touchpad.
This is also confirmed in the X11 log file:
Code:
$ grep -i "syna2b4c" /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) config/udev: Adding input device SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse (/dev/input/event6)
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall"
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: Applying InputClass "libinput pointer catchall"
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) Using input driver 'libinput' for 'SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse'
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: always reports core events
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) event6  - SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: is tagged by udev as: Mouse
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) event6  - SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: device is a pointer
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) event6  - SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: device removed
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) libinput: SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: Step value 0 was provided, libinput Fallback acceleration function is used.
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) libinput: SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: Step value 0 was provided, libinput Fallback acceleration function is used.
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) libinput: SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: Step value 0 was provided, libinput Fallback acceleration function is used.
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse" (type: MOUSE, id 11)
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: (accel) selected scheme none/0
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: (accel) acceleration factor: 2.00
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (**) SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: (accel) acceleration threshold: 4
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) event6  - SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: is tagged by udev as: Mouse
[2026-03-29 15:53:56] (II) event6  - SYNA2B4C:01 06CB:8252 Mouse: device is a pointer
So now it seems the root of the problem is udev tagging my touchpad as a mouse, is there a way to configure udev to tag my touchpad device (SYNA2B4C) manually?
Also note I am using XLibre rather than Xorg, however I don't think this is now relevant since the issue seems to be with udev rather than X.

Other info that might be relevant:​

Laptop: Lenovo ideapad 130-15IKB
FreeBSD version: 15.0-RELEASE (Note: I switched from quarterly to latest branch in pkg)
Desktop Environment: MATE 1.28.2
X11 version: XLibre X Server 1.25.1.2
 
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