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 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 -- Pali Rohár pali.rohar@xxxxxxxxx
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