Hi,
On Fri, 2020-02-21 at 14:28 +0200, Jani Nikula wrote:
In general I think it's preferrable if the hotkey sends the key event to userspace that then makes the policy decision of what, if anything, to do with it. Everything is much easier if the policy is in userspace control. For example, you could define content based policies for enabling privacy screen, something that is definitely not possible with firmware.
I emphatize with the desire to just bypass everything at the hardware/firmware level, because that is totally in your control (as an OEM), and requires no interaction with the operating system initially. Exposing the read-only state of the privacy screen is helpful, but prevents the OS from building more advanced features on top, failing to reach the full potential of the nice hardware feature.
There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here. On the Lenovo laptops the feature is automatically adjusted by the Firmware. However, the setting itself is read/write and it can also be controlled from userspace.
In principle, I agree that it makes sense to control these things from software and have a toggle key event that is send around. It has the unfortunate disadvantage though that it requires updating the entire userspace. Including the ugly side effect that we continue to have trouble to support these things on X11 due protocol restrictions with "high" key codes (>= 248).
Benjamin