Re: [PATCH v3 09/11] platform/x86: asus-wmi: Control RGB keyboard backlight

[Dan Murphy]

Yurii

On 5/9/19 2:04 PM, Yurii Pavlovskyi wrote:
> First of all, thanks to Andy for all the review comments!
> 
> I will implement all the ones that I didn't directly answer on as well and
> update this series shortly.
> 
> Regarding this patch,
> 
> On 08.05.19 19:12, Pavel Machek wrote:
>>> Shouldn't be the LED subsystem driver for this?
>>
>> Yes, please. We have common interface for LED drivers; this needs to
>> use it.
> 
> That is indeed a better option and I did in fact considered this first and
> even did a test implementation. The discoveries were:
> 1. The WMI methods are write-only and only written all at once in a
> transaction manner (also invoking solely first RGB-interface method has no
> effect until some other keyboard backlight method is called).
> 2. In addition to RGB there are several control values, which switch
> effects, speed and enable or disable the backlight under specific
> conditions or switch whether it is set temporarily or permanently (not that
> these are critical functionalities, but for the sake of completeness).
> 3. The EC is really slow
> # time bash -c "echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/faustus/kbbl_set"
> 
> real	0m0,691s
> user	0m0,000s
> sys	0m0,691s
> 
> (please ignore the sysfs-path there, it's essentially the same code running
> as in this patch). It is consistently same for both temporary and permanent
> configuration. Writing after every change would take about (6+)x of that.
> Not that it's that unbearable though as it is not likely to be done often.
> 
> I was not quite happy with that implementation so I opted for writing sort
> of sysfs wrapper instead that would allow same sort of transactions as
> provided by BIOS. I agree that it's non-standard solution.
> 
> If I understood correctly, the typical current RGB led_class devices from
> the Linux tree currently provide channels as separate LEDs. There are also
> blink / pattern options present, I guess one could misuse them for setting
> effects and speed. So one could make 3 devices for RGB + 3 for awake,
> sleep, boot modes + 1 for setting effect / speed.
> 
> I'd guess the end solution might be also either something like combination
> of both approaches (RGB leds + separate sysfs interface) or some extension
> of the led_class device interface. Dropping support of the non-essential
> features for the sake of uniformity of ABI would also be an option to
> consider (exposing just three RGB LEDs with brightness only), not happy one
> though.
> 
> In any case this looks like it might need some additional research,
> discussion, development, and a pair of iterations so I tend to separate
> this patch from the series and post it extra after the others are through
> to avoid dragging 10+ patches around.
> 
> Any suggestions on how to do this properly would be appreciated. That's the
> best I could come up with at the moment.
> 

We are working on a framework for this.

Please see this series
https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/project/lkml/list/?series=390141

It is still a work in progress

> Thanks,
> Yurii
>