[Holzhaus]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to prevent Kodi from grabbing the event devices in "/dev/input"? Or, alternatively, how make kodi release these devices at runtime?

The reason I need to do this is that I'm using Kodi in combination with Advanced Launcher for launching emulators (retroarch, mupen64plus and the like). Since I'm running kodi on an ARM-SBC without X11, I need to stop kodi before launching the actual emulator and resume it after exiting the game, which i'm doing via a custom launcher script:

Code:

kill -STOP $(pgrep kodi.bin)
# playing games
kill -CONT $(pgrep kodi.bin)

This part basically works great, except that my Xbox360 controller does not work when I launch emulators like that, because kodi still has control of /dev/input/event2 so that retroarch cannot use them, as reported by:

Code:

$ lsof /dev/input/event0

I disabled joystick and mouse support in guisettings.xml (I'm only using yatse to control Kodi).

Thanks in advance,
Jan

[Holzhaus]

Just in case someone has the same problem: I figured that there probably is no way to prevent Kodi from grabbing these devices, so I had to revoke its permission to access input devices.

The permissions of my event devices look like this:

Code:

$ ls -l /dev/input/event*
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 64  1. Jan 1970  /dev/input/event0
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 65  1. Jan 1970  /dev/input/event1
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 66 21. Mär 15:53 /dev/input/event2
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 67 21. Mär 15:53 /dev/input/event3
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 68 21. Mär 15:53 /dev/input/event4
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 69 21. Mär 15:53 /dev/input/event5

Thus I removed my kodi user from the input group:

Code:

# gpasswd -d kodi input

Then I added this to my /etc/sudoers:

Code:

kodi ALL=(kodi:input) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/retroarch, /usr/bin/mupen64plus

Now, my kodi user can't access the input devices, but he can run:

Code:

sudo -u kodi -g input retroarch

and:

Code:

sudo -u kodi -g input mupen64plus

So Kodi itself can't access the event devices, but retroarch/mupenplus can.

[jackiass]

Is there any way to just block /dev/input/event3 ? I have a keyboard that reports touch events on that input, even though it is not a touch device. Makes it useless after touch screen support got added to kodi.

[thctlo]

You can try to stop it loadin in X. with something like these example.

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

This is how i stop my remote from loadin in X so kodi take my kernel driver and not lirc for my remote.
You can try the same for you device you want to stop loading.

Here i match on product name, found with command : dmesg | grep Nuvoton

Add it in : /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-evdev-quirks.conf
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Nuvoton Remote USERDEFINED"
Driver "evdev"
MatchProduct "Nuvoton w836x7hg Infrared Remote Transceiver"
Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection