Magic Alt-SysRq change in 2.6.18-rc1

Alan Stern
2006-07-09T21:07:01Z

Dmitry:

Are you the right person to handle changes in the behavior of Alt-SysRq?

Before 2.6.18-rc1, I used to be able to use it as follows:

Press and hold an Alt key,
Press and hold the SysRq key,
Release the Alt key,
Press and release some hot key like S or T or 7,
Repeat the previous step as many times as desired,
Release the SysRq key.

This scheme doesn't work any more, or if it does, the timing requirements
are now much stricter. In practice I have to hold down all three keys at
the same time; I can't release the Alt key before pressing the hot key.

This makes thinks very awkward on my laptop machine. Its keyboard
controller doesn't seem to like having three keys pressed simultaneously.
Instead of the expected hotkey behavior, I usually got an error message
from atkbd warning about too many keys being pressed. Getting it to work
as desired is hit-and-miss.

I would really appreciate going back to the old behavior, where only two
keys needed to be held down at any time.

Alan Stern