Wintab dll: Status report.
Ok, I've done some preliminary testing, and fixed obvious bugs that have arisen. What I found, and could fix: Sometimes a badly configured tablet can generate X errors on the XOpenDevice method. Fixed by ensuring tablet driver was functional. I don't know if the errors need to be caught, or not, but I think they were causing crashes. This is probably related to synchonous/asynchonous X modes. In Photoshop, an infinite loop in method FindOpenContext when attepting to traverse the wintab context chain. In Painter, a number of methods didn't handle NULL prameters properly, resulting in various crashes. Wintab uses NULL paramters to signify a query for size of available data, or to signify a request to flush the Wintab packet queue. Aric, I'm wondering if I should really be fixing these things, as these look like the kind of bugs Code Weavers will have fixed in the normal course of product support. After fixing these issues, The following remain: 1. Photoshop doesn't seem to respond to pressure. 2. Painter receives wintab events, but coordinates are extreme: only see lines from one side of drawing to another. 3. Maybe some further research into the errors from XOpenDevice. I'm not convinced it is a problem. Aric, are these the kind of bugs you were seeing with Painter? I'm suspicious of the Wintab packet building code, as it has to build a C data struct on the fly. Looking at the code though, I can't see anything that could be going wrong. It could also be a scaling issue, where the scales deduced from X are wrong (I remember being suspicious of some of the values returned by the wacom driver). I've got tons of trace code that runs as a wrapper round wintab on win98, and will move some of this into the wine impl for more testing. I hope this will help solve the remaining bugs. I think in the light of the crashing bugs, Aric's patch shouldn't go in as-is. If people want, I could post up a patch with the fixes I've added so far. That's all for now. -Rob.
Sometimes a badly configured tablet can generate X errors on the XOpenDevice method. Fixed by ensuring tablet driver was functional. I don't know if the errors need to be caught, or not, but I think they were causing crashes. This is probably related to synchonous/asynchonous X modes.
In case you want to catch this, there is a mechanism in place in Wine to handle X calls which can lead, in 'normal usage' to X11 error being sent. Look at, for example, the DGA2 initialization. Lionel -- Lionel Ulmer - http://www.bbrox.org/
Interesting. Since I had myself as well as at lest 3 other organizations of testers testing this code at each step with Photoshop6 and 7 and Painter 7 as well as a number of test applications. None of us saw these problems.
What I found, and could fix:
Sometimes a badly configured tablet can generate X errors on the XOpenDevice method. Fixed by ensuring tablet driver was functional. I don't know if the errors need to be caught, or not, but I think they were causing crashes. This is probably related to synchonous/asynchonous X modes.
Was XOpenDevice returning a device but also creating errors? That seems really counter intuitive since it is only suppose to return the device if it succeeds. However I am not much of a x11 programmer. When this error occurred where was the crash? probably at some point where I am gathering the tablet information. It would be good to find that line and fix it there also.
In Photoshop, an infinite loop in method FindOpenContext when attepting to traverse the wintab context chain.
Something is going seriously wrong here if there is an infinite loop. The contexts should be a linked list so someone's next is pointing to something previous in the list. WHen i did photoshop it created only 2 contexts (and only did anything with 1 of them) both where contexts to the root window. Where is this loop being created?
In Painter, a number of methods didn't handle NULL prameters properly, resulting in various crashes. Wintab uses NULL paramters to signify a query for size of available data, or to signify a request to flush the Wintab packet queue.
Which methods? I thought that i had handled all the cases i had seen used this way.
Aric, I'm wondering if I should really be fixing these things, as these look like the kind of bugs Code Weavers will have fixed in the normal course of product support.
Like I said, We saw none of these problems. It was working wonderfully for me, and all our tester and customers. So if you need to fix things for your tablet then you should fix them because I cannot reproduce it here at all.
After fixing these issues, The following remain:
1. Photoshop doesn't seem to respond to pressure. 2. Painter receives wintab events, but coordinates are extreme: only see lines from one side of drawing to another. 3. Maybe some further research into the errors from XOpenDevice. I'm not convinced it is a problem.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that your tablet is working under X. There is a great little program called xinput, it is a utility that test the XInput module. You can see all the axis of your device and make sure they are working. I found that to get XInput to recognize pressure from my wacom tablet i needed to run the latest wacom drivers from http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/main. you can download xinput from ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz
Aric, are these the kind of bugs you were seeing with Painter?
no actually, the problem I was seeing was a race condition inside painter with the button/pressure testing code. Such that after you lifted the stylus painter would still think that the stylus was in contact with the pad and keep drawing.
I'm suspicious of the Wintab packet building code, as it has to build a C data struct on the fly. Looking at the code though, I can't see anything that could be going wrong. It could also be a scaling issue, where the scales deduced from X are wrong (I remember being suspicious of some of the values returned by the wacom driver).
This i tested alot with my own test programs and it seemed to be working quite well.
I think in the light of the crashing bugs, Aric's patch shouldn't go in as-is.
If people want, I could post up a patch with the fixes I've added so far.
I would like to see more details about where you are having these problems and how you fix them as I may be able to continue to help out. thanks -aric
Aric Stewart aric-at-codeweavers.com |Wine Mailing Lists| wrote:
Interesting. Since I had myself as well as at lest 3 other organizations of testers testing this code at each step with Photoshop6 and 7 and Painter 7 as well as a number of test applications. None of us saw these problems.
What I found, and could fix:
Sometimes a badly configured tablet can generate X errors on the XOpenDevice method. Fixed by ensuring tablet driver was functional. I don't know if the errors need to be caught, or not, but I think they were causing crashes. This is probably related to synchonous/asynchonous X modes.
Was XOpenDevice returning a device but also creating errors? That seems really counter intuitive since it is only suppose to return the device if it succeeds. However I am not much of a x11 programmer.
When this error occurred where was the crash? probably at some point where I am gathering the tablet information. It would be good to find that line and fix it there also.
I will have to re-produce the error first. That could be difficult: hardware in linux tends to work very well, or very badly. My tablet is currently working very well. I could have confused the crash from one of the null pointer errors, so I'm beginning to suspect this could have been a red herring.
In Photoshop, an infinite loop in method FindOpenContext when attepting to traverse the wintab context chain.
Something is going seriously wrong here if there is an infinite loop. The contexts should be a linked list so someone's next is pointing to something previous in the list. WHen i did photoshop it created only 2 contexts (and only did anything with 1 of them) both where contexts to the root window.
Where is this loop being created?
It's actually pretty clear from the code: The following referes to the "context.c" file.... in fuction TABLET_FindOpenContext, line 129 is: ptr = ptr->next; in function FindOpenContext there should be an equivalent line, after line 175. If you still want more information about then this occurs, I can provide it.
In Painter, a number of methods didn't handle NULL prameters properly, resulting in various crashes. Wintab uses NULL paramters to signify a query for size of available data, or to signify a request to flush the Wintab packet queue.
Which methods? I thought that i had handled all the cases i had seen used this way.
WTInfoA, fails for standard wCategory, or nIndex values if lpOutput == NULL. Fixed by modifying CopyTabletData to suppress memcpy if target == NULL. WTPacketsGet,WTPacket,WTPacketsPeek,WTDataGet will all fail when passed a NULL lpPkts. I've only really fixed this for WTPacketsGet,as this was the only one where it caused crashes/ Also another bug I neglected to mention what that many of these functions flush the buffer using memcpy, to copy overlaping sections.
Aric, I'm wondering if I should really be fixing these things, as these look like the kind of bugs Code Weavers will have fixed in the normal course of product support.
Like I said, We saw none of these problems. It was working wonderfully for me, and all our tester and customers. So if you need to fix things for your tablet then you should fix them because I cannot reproduce it here at all.
In that case, I wonder if it could be due to different compiler/library versions, and static vs. dynamic linking?
The first thing you need to do is make sure that your tablet is working under X. There is a great little program called xinput, it is a utility that test the XInput module. You can see all the axis of your device and make sure they are working. I found that to get XInput to recognize pressure from my wacom tablet i needed to run the latest wacom drivers from http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/index.php/main.
you can download xinput from ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz
My tablet works fine with Gimp. I'll have a look at the latest wacom drivers, and at the XInput extension. I'll run the test program as a sanity check. Infact.... the XInput extension could be what's causing the scaling to go funny. When I said I was suspicous of the scaling data from the wacom driver, I really meant XInput. I've been avoiding patching XInput dll so far.
Aric, are these the kind of bugs you were seeing with Painter?
no actually, the problem I was seeing was a race condition inside painter with the button/pressure testing code. Such that after you lifted the stylus painter would still think that the stylus was in contact with the pad and keep drawing.
Ok, So not there yet :-(
I'm suspicious of the Wintab packet building code, as it has to build a C data struct on the fly. Looking at the code though, I can't see anything that could be going wrong. It could also be a scaling issue, where the scales deduced from X are wrong (I remember being suspicious of some of the values returned by the wacom driver).
This i tested alot with my own test programs and it seemed to be working quite well.
I think in the light of the crashing bugs, Aric's patch shouldn't go in as-is.
If people want, I could post up a patch with the fixes I've added so far.
I would like to see more details about where you are having these problems and how you fix them as I may be able to continue to help out.
I think it might be easist for me to post a patch that includes the fixes. The fixes are pretty simple, really. V.easy to spot with a diff against you original patch. Cheers -Rob.
participants (3)
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Aric Stewart -
Lionel Ulmer -
Robert North