Increase USB polling rate across all devices in linux?

Question

I just came across this tweak that permits one to increase the polling rate of a usb mouse to 1KHz. Is it possible to achieve the same increase to other USB devices (or all USB devices)? I'm a researcher in cognitive science and I conduct experiments using keyboards and gamepads (usually a wired xbox 360 gamepad) for human input where an increased polling rate would mean better measurement accuracy of response times.

Answer 1

I don't know of any general mechanism. I believe that one has to tweak the sources of the kernel or the respective driver.

A ray of hope is given by this answer to the thread I-PAC / Keyboard Encoder polling rate :

On Linux, it is possible to set the USB mouse polling rate, and almost all mice can work with 500Hz polling. There's no official support for increased polling speed of other HID devices (and I assume the I-PAC is a standard HID device), but with a simple modification to drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c you can increase the polling rate for those too. I poll my USB keyboard at 250Hz and it works perfectly, but I haven't tested other keyboards, and it's likely that it won't work with all devices.