[Oberon] oberon-uefi ?

[Michael Schierl]

Hello,

Am 06.11.2022 schrieb D EMARD:
> I can try to search some simple uefi source example that
> supports USB mouse.

Ther is EFI_SIMPLE_POINTER_PROTOCOL which is available in gnu-efi as
well as in EDK2.

<https://github.com/rhboot/gnu-efi/blob/master/inc/efipoint.h>

And yes, the protocol is really simple. Which does not guarantee that it
works on your machine :)

I have read some blogs that for
> uefi PS/2 mouse/kbd is easier than USB and laptops internally
> hjave PS/2 kbd and touchpad.

It all depends on what drivers are included in your motherboard
firmware. And while the embedded controller of my notebook emulates a
PS/2 keyboard, the touchpad is not emulated at all (neither as a PS/2
mouse nor an USB HID device). So for OSes that do not have native
support for Elantech touchpads, no mouse for me... And also not in UEFI.

> I tried free memtest86 binary, it works with USB mouse support

Good for you :)

Maybe I should buy a new notebook at some point (it is almost 10 years old).

> EDK2 has something that looks like usb mouse driver support

The USB mouse drivers in Tianocore EDK2 only support two mouse buttons.
See https://bsdio.com/edk2/docs/master/_usb_mouse_8c_source.html line
828ff. But on the bright side, they should support interclicks just fine.

> I think EFI Clover bootloader is compiled with EDK2 and it has
> mouse support.

Clover, that was that bootloader for Macs/Haskintoshes? To be honest,
the variety of different hardware on Macs (even on Hackintoshes) is a
fraction of that you find on a PC.

> For gnu-efi there seems to exist some low-level USB support,
> I think there is USB class protocol and user should decode mouse
> protocol.

While it is possible for boot service applications to take over the USB
host controller, I am not sure whether that is a good idea. You'd at
least have to make sure that the device the user booted from was not
connected to that same host controller, or you'd have to implement all
the USB Mass Storage and filesystem stuff on your own. And while the
alternative would be to load a custom Dxe for your USB device and leave
the host controller under the control of UEFI boot services, I don't
know if you can load a custom Dxe for USB mice (supporting more buttons)
if your system firmware already includes one (that supports only two of
them).

> I did some low-level USB 3-btn and wheel mouse support on FPGA
> using lowlevel class support. Most mouses have same data structure
> like logitech, it reports few bytes for each event move or click.
> so most logitech mouses work, and approx 50% other
> models have data structure same as logitech.

To be honest, when you start to reimplement drivers at that level, why
not just use the drivers (USB keyboard/mouse/storage) of e.g. Linux or
A2 and let it run on EFI framebuffer?

I believe there is a Linux hosted version for every Oberon variant in
existence.


UEFI boot services makes sense to be independent of hardware (so you can
play GRUB invaders on any device that has a keyboard, screen and UEFI).
Once you need to write hardware specific drivers, I'd prefer to
piggyback on some existing OS that has implemented everything for it.
Unless you consider it a challenge to run it without any
Linux/Windows/A2 in between.


Regards,


Michael