All seven virtual-pad managers (Linux uinput/uhid: gamepad, dualsense,
dualshock4, steam_controller; Windows XUSB/UMDF: gamepad, dualsense,
dualshock4) carried an identical copy-pasted `broken: bool` latch that
was set on the FIRST pad-creation error and never cleared — so a single
transient failure (a startup race on /dev/uinput, a momentary EBUSY, the
Windows companion driver not yet ready) permanently disabled EVERY
controller for the rest of the session, even after the cause cleared.
Extract that latch into one shared, unit-tested `PadGate`
(inject/pad_gate.rs) with the fix baked in: capped exponential backoff
(1s doubling to 30s) instead of a permanent kill. After a failure,
creation is blocked only until the backoff elapses — so the manager no
longer re-attempts (and re-logs) on every one of the 60–240 input
frames/sec — then a single retry is allowed; a success resets the
backoff. A genuinely broken setup therefore self-heals within one
backoff window of the fix (udev reload / driver install / next client
connect) with no host restart. The gate is manager-wide, matching the
old flag's semantics (these failures are systemic, not per-slot).
This folds G3 (broken latch) into G12 (dedup the manager skeleton): the
latch now lives in one place across all seven backends.
Verified on the Linux host build (.21): cargo clippy -D warnings clean,
full punktfunk-host suite 277 passed / 0 failed, 4 new PadGate tests
green. Windows managers verified separately on the x64 box.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
5109a4c80a