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...)
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/