Re: [PATCH v2] platform/x86: asus-wmi: Add keyboard backlight toggle support

[Benjamin Berg <bberg@redhat.com>]

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Hi Daniel,

I had a quick chat with Bastien about this. The conclusion was that
reusing the TOGGLE key may be problematic for gnome-settings-daemon.
And the alternative of a new CYCLE key also has some caveats.

The most straight forward solution is likely to simply handle the
brightness change in the kernel and not report the key to userspace at
all. This should work just fine and at least GNOME will show an on
screen display in response to the brightness change.

Do you think that approach would work well?

Benjamin


On Mon, 2018-05-14 at 18:25 -0600, Daniel Drake wrote:
> Hi Andy,
> 
> On Mon, May 7, 2018 at 8:46 AM, Daniel Drake <drake@endlessm.com>
> wrote:
> > > > Some Asus laptops like UX550GE has hotkey (Fn+F7) for keyboard
> > > > backlight toggle. In this UX550GE, the hotkey incremet the
> > > > level
> > > > of brightness for each keypress from 1 to 3, and then switch it
> > > > off when the brightness has been the max. This commit
> > > > interprets
> > > > the code 0xc7 generated from hotkey to KEY_KBDILLUMUP to
> > > > increment
> > > > the brightness, then pass KEY_KBDILLUMTOGGLE to user space
> > > > after
> > > > the brightness max been reached for switching the led off.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Pushed to my review and testing queue, thanks!
> > 
> > We found that GNOME's handling of the toggle key is somewhat
> > imperfect
> > and it will need modifying before we achieve the
> > Up-Up-Up-off-Up-Up-Up-off... cycle that we are looking for.
> > 
> > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/issues/41
> > 
> > In that discussion an alternative perspective was raised:
> > 
> > Is it right for the kernel to modify the key sent to userspace,
> > when
> > it is then relying on the specific userspace action of it changing
> > the
> > brightness to the next expected level? (and this userspace
> > behaviour
> > is not even working right in the GNOME case)
> > 
> > Instead, would it make sense for the kernel to always report TOGGLE
> > in
> > this case, and for GNOME to interpret toggle as simply "cycle
> > through
> > all the available brightness levels"?
> 
> Any comments on this? I am tempted to send a patch to just make this
> key always emit TOGGLE from the kernel given that we have a tentative
> agreement on implementing the brightness cycle within GNOME.
> 
> Daniel
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