On Sun, 01 Dec 2019, Celejar wrote: > 1) Most of the function keys don't seem to have scancodes / keycodes > (evtest doesn't react in any way to their press / release). Is this a > hardware thing - they just aren't designed as keyboard keys - or a > failure of the kernel? Some of the ones that have no keycodes do work, > however (F5-7). Is this happening through the BIOS or something at a > lower level than the kernel?
The thinkpad-acpi exports a fully reconfigurable input device. *If* it gets the keycode from the thinkpad firmware, it can map it to any EV_KEY event. Refer to its documentation (and to udev's) for details. Maybe someone wrote a GUI thing to remap input device events. If such a thing exists, you can use it. > 2) How do the function keys that are supposed to do stuff in Windows > work? If they don't send scancodes, how do they communicate with the > operating system, and how can they be used under Linux? In windows, a Lenovo driver hooks to ACPI and WMI and does whatever is needed. Thinkpad-acpi can handle the ACPI events. No idea about WMI ones. > 3) Why doesn't F4 do anything (the microphone continues to work > regardless of my pressing F4)? Because you need to mess with the HDA mixer for that to work, I think. If there *is* an ACPI fuction to change a gate that the standard audio subsystem cannot mess with, thinkpad-acpi alone might be able to do something about it. But if you need to mess with the HDA mixer, you need a cross-subsystem callback layer to let something inside the kernel order ALSA to mute the mic and not let anything else unmute it. I don't think this exists [yet]. So, it boils down to: thinkpad-acpi could generate an input event, and something in userspace would have to handle it and mute the mic through alsa. You could reprogram the thinkpad-acpi input device to issue MIC_MUTE and see if that gets handled by something in your desktop environment... -- Henrique Holschuh
