GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 750630
Keyboard Backlight Toggle does not work with toshiba kbd_backlight_mode
Last modified: 2019-03-20 11:27:16 UTC
I have a keyboard with backlight. The backlight has a toggle key on the keyboard (Fn+Z) which is recognised as XF86KbdLightOnOff This key is bound in gsd-media-keys-manager to run some action on a UPower proxy. 1) I cannot assign this key to another program in gnome-control-center / Keyboard / Shortcuts. It is properly detected when assigning (as KbdLightOnOff) but ignored when pressed (the original Gnome pop-up still appears) 2) The Keyboard Backlight control as done by GNOME does not have any effect Since it only tries to use the UPower/KbdBacklight proxy, which is in fact a *Brightness* control. The way it seems to detect it is by scanning /sys/class/leds/* for kbd_backlight. However, the Backlight in the Toshiba Z-30 is a tri-state toggle: ON/OFF/Automatic after delay, without any configurable brightness. As such, I need to write the bits 2, 4 or 5 to /sys/devices/platform/*/firmware_node/kbd_backlight_mode. It does not have any kbd_backlight file in /sys/class/leds. If I could bind a script to this key, I would be able to fix this. Or if UPower supported tri-state keyboard backlights, I suppose it might work as well. Thanks for your help!
The fact that it cannot be rebound won't be fixed/changed, so I'll remove that from the bug title. Thanks for the information on the rest though. I was testing a Toshiba laptop last week, and was wondering what kind of tricks the firmware was playing wrt. the keyboard backlight operation. We'll have to see just how much work is necessary to make this work properly.
Created attachment 304893 [details] script to toggle the keyboard light I attach a small sample script how to operate the keyboard light, but unfortunately it seems impossible to easily integrate this directly.
Hi, I stumbled over this one while looking to see if an issue I'm hitting atm was already filed. IMHO this is a kernel bug, there should be a kernel driver which properly exports a led class device for the keyboard like it is done one both Dell and Lenovo laptops already. Regards, Hans
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