Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270

From	Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270
Date	2016-11-17 15:40 +0100
Message-ID	<sEvRo-1Pv-15@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	<sEt3c-8sS-17@gated-at.bofh.it> <sEw14-1T0-23@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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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.

> 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

OK.


thanks,

Takashi

Thread

"Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> - 2016-11-17 12:30 +0100
  Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Pali Rohár <pali.rohar@gmail.com> - 2016-11-17 15:30 +0100
    Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> - 2016-11-17 18:10 +0100
  Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> - 2016-11-17 15:40 +0100
  Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> - 2016-11-17 15:40 +0100
  Re: "Setting old previous keyboard state failed" error on Dell E7270 Pali Rohár <pali.rohar@gmail.com> - 2016-11-17 19:10 +0100

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