evfwd
codeberg.org
A tool for forwarding events from evdev devices using uinput

evfwd is a new tool for forwarding evdev input events from one Linux host to another, typically through an ssh connection.

The reason I am posting this here is that my initial motivation for creating the tool was gaming related: I wanted to be able to use my laptop’s keyboard and gamepad on my Steam Deck.

The tool works by serializing /dev/input/… events on one hosts and then injecting them via /dev/uinput on another. You have to arrange the pipe between the two ends, typically using ssh:

evfwd /dev/input/somedevice | ssh somehost evfwd -s

See the readme for more details.

  • Björn TantauEnglish
    12•24 days ago

    Nice! So that should also work to use the Steam Deck as a gamepad on a PC, right?

    • @donioOPEnglish
      10•24 days ago

      Yes, that works too with one fairly big caveat: for some reason the Steam Deck’s controller is not producing evdev events until a game is actually running on the deck. So evfwd is not receiving events while the Steam UI is active. I haven’t been able to figure out yet why this is the case.

      If you want to try it you can start a random game on the deck and then fire up evfwd on the controller device and using the -g (grab) flag to avoid passing events to the running game.

      Edit: while we are talking about the Steam Deck: when ssh-ing to the deck it can be helpful to turn off wifi power management to avoid lag: iw wlan0 set power_save off

        • @donioOPEnglish
          5•23 days ago

          Thanks. I tried to make sense of it and experimented a bit with making the same ioctl’s mentioned but couldn’t get it to work. I either didn’t get it right or it’s something else.

          Maybe I will take another look later but for now my workaround is to just fire up Baba Is You which idles at a low cpu use and then run evfwd with the grab option so that Baba no longer gets the input.