Caps lock XOR on multiple keyboards?
From: George Spelvin
Date: Mon Dec 03 2012 - 16:19:01 EST
(Not sure who owns this; Cc: to the last few people to touch
drivers/tty/vt/keyboard.c.)
I happen to have both a PS/2 and USB keyboard plugged, in, but was
noticing that the caps lock key seemed inverted. When the LED was off,
I got all caps (unless I used shift), while when it was on I got normal
lower-case letters.
This quite confused me, until I looked over and saw that someone had
hit caps lock on the PS/2.
Experimenting, it seems that each keyboard has its own caps lock LED
state, and the XOR of the two controls the case of the letters.
The corresponding shift keys have a shared logical state which depends
on who last had a transition. Holding down left-shift on one can be
cancelled by pressing and releasing left-shift on the other. (But
left & right shift are tracked separately.)
It would make more sense if each keyboard's caps lock LED controlled
the effect on its keys. Either give each keyboard a completely separate
caps lock state, or toggle both LEDs when either caps lock is pressed.
Perhaps the answer is "It's too much work to fix; stop doing something
so stupid", but I thought I'd at least mention it.
(Er... it appears that my XOR description was incomplete. I now have
the keyboard system in a state where *one* caps lock LED has to be on
to get normal lower-case letters. I was playing with down1/down2/up1/up2
combinations, but I'm not quite sure what happened...)
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