Linux 5.11 Adding An "Inhibited" Feature To Temporarily Disregard Select Input Devices

The Linux kernel's input subsystem is gaining a new "inhibited" property feature as a policy to temporarily block input from given devices, including not using any event from them as a possible wake-up source.

This input inhibited property is being led by Google ChromeOS engineers in conjunction with Collabora and the initial use-case for inhibiting input from select devices is a 2-in-1/laptop use-case where the keyboard may be folded under the screen for creating a tablet-like experience. This new property allows for such a property to be created in user-space so that when such a keyboard folding event occurs it could inhibit the input from that given device. Other use-cases will also surely materialize.

Queued into the input-next code ahead of the Linux 5.11 kernel is this functionality, which is exposed to user-space via a sysfs interface.

The new documentation lays out more details on this means of inhibiting for ignoring input events from selected devices.