strange behavior on multimedia eject button for cdrom

[Harald Dunkel <harald.dunkel@t-online.de>]

Hi folks,

My laptop (Dell XPS M1330) has some multimedia keys added to the
keyboard, including an eject button for the cdrom drive, instead
of a "regular" eject button built into the drive itself.

When I press it to eject a CD, then Linux becomes pretty mad: The
audio device gets stuck somehow, playing the same tune over and
over again, the network connection is frozen, etc. Once the CD is
out it is back to normal, as it seems.

I would guess that the eject button triggers some bios functionality,
outside of the control of the kernel. But is it? How comes that
Linux seems to loose control in this case?

Kernel is 2.6.24.2 (amd64).

AFAICS this eject button has no keycode. The other multimedia keys
have.


Any helpful idea would be very welcome.


Regards

Harri