An update on mouse support

written by Simon Glass | 18 November 2025

Over the last few months (and since the last post) the mouse support in U-Boot Concept has matured quite a bit. The various performance improvements have had a big impact and the UI is now smooth and useable. Here’s a video:

So what’s next? Let’s look at a few topics.

Touchpads

So far touchpads are only supported in the EFI app, assuming that the underlying firmware enables this. On real hardware, such as the Qualcomm x1e laptops, this seems to work OK.

Support on other platforms requires a driver. The USB mouse driver (CONFIG_USB_MOUSE) might work, or it might not. If the touchpad is attached via I2C or SPI, then a different driver would be needed, perhaps with a special protocol for the device.

EFI app

So how do you the mouse or touchpad running on the EFI app? Just make sure that CONFIG_EFI_MOUSE is enabled when you build the U-Boot app, and all should be well.

Unfortunately the widely used ‘ovmf’ Debian package does not enable the mouse, or at least not properly. This is used for running EFI apps under QEMU. U-Boot’s build-efi script passes the required arguments, but this is not enough.

If you would like to build a version of EDK2 which supports the mouse / touchpad, it is quite simple. Just change these two files.

First, in OvmfPkg/Include/Dsc/UsbComponents.dsc.inc add this line, e.g. between UsbKbDxe and UsbMassStorageDxe so that it builds the mouse driver:

  MdeModulePkg/Bus/Usb/UsbMouseDxe/UsbMouseDxe.inf

Second, in OvmfPkg/OvmfPkgX64.fdf add this line, e.g. between UsbKbDxe and UsbMassStorageDxe so that the driver ends up in the firmware volume:

INF  MdeModulePkg/Bus/Usb/UsbMouseDxe/UsbMouseDxe.inf

Clicking in more places

So far, clicking in a lineedit object just places the cursor at the end of that object. Really it should set the cursor to the clicked position. This will become more important when the test editor is finished, since there may be a lot of text on the screen.

This is fairly simple to implement and should appear early in the new year.

Selecting text

A more ambitious feature would be text selection, where the mouse can be used to select part of a lineedit. This would need to be done as part of a copy/paste feature. It would make the text editor a little more functional, but it is not really core feature. If you are interested in implementing that, send an email to the U-Boot Concept mailing list!