On Tuesday 24 February 2015 00:31:52 Mario Limonciello wrote:I don't have any more information I can share on this interface other than I wouldn't recommend to rely on it. It's generally not supposed to be used by the OS but only for diagnostic purposes from BIOS level diagnostic tools.
For older dell models (some old inspirions and maybe also
latitude) it was possible to use undocumented DELLDIAG interface
(which enter into SMM mode and call some functions) to enable
that "RAW" mode.
Now when you are discussing with us, do you have some information
or can you comment (if it is not secret) that DELLDIAG SMM
interface?
In linux kernel we have for it driver (provides info about
temperature, fan speed, power management, hotkeys, ...), but it
use undocumented interface (and sometimes it has problems):
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/i8k.c
Nothing new. It is that problem with repeating keys which is
fixed by last version of BIOS.
I saw one E6440 model with preinstalled Ubuntu 12.04.2 and
distributed with A08 BIOS (which had that problem). And this was
very very annoying! You could imagine it, you buy new Latitude
(business class pro notebook), you started it and on preinstalled
OS, keyboard is not usable. Updating to A10 fixed it.
In this forum thread people reported that "repeating keys"Yes, there is a support agent in that thread relaying those models to the BIOS team.
problem for more models: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19593360?pi239031352=19
And it looks like (from what I'm reading) last version A10 of
E6440 BIOS broke USB3.0 support.