Keyboard dead for a bunch of LG laptops

[Joonas Saarinen <jza@saunalahti.fi>]

Hello, people! There's still lingering an interesting regression where 
the internal keyboard of various older LG laptops is dead. It is tracked 
here:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58991

Downstream:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=969550
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1243904
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1256776

Late last year, I personally did a git bisect on LG LW25 which ended up 
pointing at an atkbd patch:

be2d7e4233a4fe439125b825470020cef83407d5
Input: atkbd - fix multi-byte scancode handling on reconnect

Full description about that patch and some discussion:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fa.linux.kernel/rUpZ8-HaQIM

Could it be that? The boot parameter i8042.dumbkbd=1 can be used to 
still make the keyboard functional. Of course that workaround leaves the 
keyboard a bit gimped (no lock LEDs, for example).

So, some questions:

1) What exactly happened? Is there something common with these LG 
machines' BIOS or keyboard controller firmware which causes the problem?

2) How could this happen? I thought the i8042 keyboard was one of the 
simplest devices in a PC. It's quite serious if it stops working like this.

3) Should something be done? Those are of course aging (Core 1 Duo era) 
machines, but I think Linux has always strived to work well with all 
sorts of hardware, old and new.


Joonas