From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Takashi Iwai Subject: Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2016 15:13:59 +0100 Message-ID: References: <201611171319.22434@pali> Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.6 - "Maruoka") Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Pali =?UTF-8?B?Um9ow6Fy?= Cc: Matthew Garrett , platform-driver-x86@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, gabriele.mzt@gmail.com List-Id: platform-driver-x86.vger.kernel.org On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 14:21:23 +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote: > > On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 13:19:16 +0100, > Pali Rohár wrote: > > > > On Thursday 17 November 2016 12:27:33 Takashi Iwai wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > > > I noticed that a new machine I got yesterday, Dell Latitude E7270, > > > always shows the error at boot time: > > > dell_laptop: Setting old previous keyboard state failed > > > > > > From what I read from the code, it seems non-fatal. But is it a way > > > to "fix" it? > > > > > > Or shouldn't we simply lower the printk level? > > > > > > > > > thanks, > > > > > > Takashi > > > > Hi! Month ago I got private email about same problem reported by user. > > Looks like that Dell changed SMBIOS interface for keyboards and have not > > notified about it... User wrote that will do some research and write > > info to mailing list. > > > > So in this case it is not non-fatal warning, but warning which telling > > us: "you are doing some operation which we do not know what is doing > > now...". > > > > Masking this warning is not a good idea. There are only two good > > options: > > > > 1) Fix the code so it will work with that changed SMBIOS interface > > > > 2) Disable that code on problematic machines. > > > > Anyway, keyboard backlight control in kernel is implemented from program > > smbios-keyboard-ctl provided and supported by Dell. I do not see any > > update to that program in upstream git repository. > > > > http://github.com/dell/libsmbios/blob/master/src/bin/smbios-keyboard-ctl > > I'll give it a try shortly later. Tried the latest git version now, and it didn't work. At setting the mode via smbios-keyboard-ctl --set-mode, it always return an error like: Set Trigger Failed. Failed to write config Error Return Code : cbRES1: 0x-2 cbRES2: 0xA000000 cbRES3: 0x0 The error code is same no matter which mode is to set. > > So there are two options what could happen: > > > > 1) smbios-keyboard-ctl is working and kernel code not -- in this case > > bug in kernel, please provide debug logs from both smbios-keyboard-ctl > > and kernel and I could try to look at it > > > > 2) smbios-keyboard-ctl is not working too -- in this case please report > > bug to that libsmbios project and Dell needs to fix it So the latter case. I'm going to ping smbios maintainer. thanks, Takashi