Dell Keyboard Backlight Support In Linux 4.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dell Keyboard Backlight Support In Linux 4.1

Ending out the major pull requests for the Linux 4.1 kernel merge window was the platform-drivers-x86 updates that were sent in on Saturday...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-Backlight-Linux-4.1

[adlerhn]

Keyboard Backlight?

I wonder what is new with the keyboard backlight. I have been using a (newish) Dell laptop for more than a year, and the keyboard backlight was (and is) always working.

[darkbasic]

Maybe not new enough?

[jhenke]

The commit lists more defaults. This patch is about giving control over the various parameters of the back light. E.g. to control the length of the time out or to back the back light permanent.

[pali]

Keyboard backlight key is handled by Dell EC, not by operating system (windows, linux, ...), so it is working out of box.

This patch for Dell laptops adds support to configure keyboard backlight by linux kernel too, so desktop application will be able to change keyboard backlight when you ask for it (e.g by GUI slider or by some external script...). And this patch allows you to set other settings which Dell EC supports. So you can set triggers which enable backlight automaticaly by HW (e.g keyboard press, touchpad activity,...) or inactivity timeout after which will be backlight automatically turned off.

For more see documentation:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-platform-dell-laptop