evbridge

Bridge Linux evdev input devices into a Wayland compositor.

evbridge watches /dev/input, and for every input device it finds it creates a matching wlroots virtual pointer / virtual keyboard in a running Wayland compositor and forwards events to it. It's built for headless or nested Wayland sessions — game-streaming containers, remote desktops, CI — where the compositor doesn't read /dev/input itself but you still want real (or emulated) input devices to drive it.

What it does

• Hotplug-aware — watches /dev/input via inotify; creates and tears down virtual devices as hardware appears and disappears.
• Classifies mice (relative), absolute mice/touch, keyboards, and gamepads.
• Pointer — relative + absolute motion, buttons, and vertical/horizontal scroll via wlr_virtual_pointer.
• Keyboard — builds an XKB keymap (configurable layout/variant/options) and forwards keys via virtual_keyboard.
• Gamepads — writes a /run/udev/data entry so SDL/Steam discover the pad via libudev.
• Robust — drops dead devices, destroys all virtual devices on exit, and periodically mknods device nodes that exist in /sys/class/input but not in a bind-mounted /dev/input (e.g. uinput devices created inside a container).

Usage

evbridge [--wayland-display WAYLAND-1] [--input-dir /dev/input]
         [--xkb-layout us] [--xkb-variant ""] [--xkb-options ""]
         [--phys-filter SUBSTR] [--log-level info]

• --phys-filter SUBSTR (or EVBRIDGE_PHYS_FILTER) — only bridge devices whose evdev phys field contains SUBSTR. Handy to bridge a specific virtual input source while ignoring the host's own devices.

The target compositor must expose the wlr_virtual_pointer and virtual_keyboard protocols (wlroots-based compositors such as labwc or sway).

Build & run

cargo build --release          # → target/release/evbridge
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 ./target/release/evbridge --phys-filter my-source

Build/runtime needs libwayland-client and libxkbcommon. Prebuilt Linux binaries are attached to each release.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option.