PS4DSHOCK(4)

💜 PS4DSHOCK 💜

okay bestie, so this is page 4 of the Kernel Interfaces Manual and it's literally all about ps4dshock — the Sony PlayStation 4 Dualshock 4 gamepad driver. yes, that's the whole vibe. your controller, but make it FreeBSD. 🎮✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

ps4dshock — Sony PlayStation 4 Dualshock 4 gamepad driver

no cap, that's it. that's the name. short, iconic, does what it says on the tin. 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

so there's two ways to get this driver living in your system, and honestly both are valid. pick your fighter:

compiling it into the kernel 🧚

drop these lines into your kernel configuration file, in exactly this order, don't @ me:

device ps4dshock
device hid
device hidbus
device hidmap
device evdev

like, all five. the whole squad. no substitutions. 🫶

orrrr loading it as a module 🔥

if you'd rather not rebuild your kernel (fair, honestly), just load the driver as a module at boot time by putting this line in loader.conf(5):

ps4dshock_load="YES"

one line. that's the whole thing. slay. ⭐

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

the ps4dshock driver provides support for the Sony PlayStation 4 Dualshock 4 gamepad driver. yes, that sentence says "driver" twice — it's giving main character energy, we love it, moving on. 😌

the /dev/input/event* device presents the game controller as an evdev type device. and here's the tea: it's accessible to members of the games group. so if your controller is being weirdly invisible, bestie, check your groups first. 🙈

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💖 SYSCTL VARIABLES 💖

these parameters are available as sysctl(8) variables. and psst — the debug parameter is also available as a loader(8) tunable, so you can set it before the system even fully wakes up. ⭐

• dev.p4dshock.*.led_state — LED state, and the values are: 0 - off, 1 - on, 2 - blinking. three moods. pick one. 💡
• dev.p4dshock.*.led_color_r — LED color. the red component. ❤️
• dev.p4dshock.*.led_color_g — LED color. the green component. 💚
• dev.p4dshock.*.led_color_b — LED color. the blue component. 💙
• dev.p4dshock.*.led_delay_on — LED blink. the on delay, in msecs. ⏱️
• dev.p4dshock.*.led_delay_off — LED blink. the off delay, in msecs. ⏱️
• hw.hid.ps4dshock.debug — debug output level, where 0 is debugging disabled and larger values increase debug message verbosity. default is 0. 🐛

note that the LED ones live under dev.p4dshock.* while the debug one is hw.hid.ps4dshock.debug — that's not a typo on my part, that's literally how they're spelled. copy them exactly or the sysctl will simply not perceive you. 💀

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• /dev/input/event* — input event device node. this is where your controller shows up to the party. 🎉

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💀 BUGS 💀

the ps4dshock does not support force-feedback events. so no rumble. no haptics. no shakey-shake. the controller will not vibrate dramatically when you get hit. it's just gonna sit there, looking pretty. 😭

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

the ps4dshock driver first appeared in FreeBSD 13.0. a whole era. 👑

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

the ps4dshock driver was written by Vladimir Kondratyev <wulf@FreeBSD.org>. give him a follow, give him a flower, give him the credit he deserves. 🫶🌸

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and that's the page bestie!! this one came to you from the Debian crew, dated November 30, 2025 — so like, thank the Debian manual-page people and the FreeBSD driver people both, because they made this whole thing possible. go forth and game. 🎮💜✨