pinephone/pinephone pro keyboard case

[theesm]

Hi,

is there a specific reason that:

[wilko@z440:~/devel/mobile-nixos/devices/pine64-pinephone/kernel]$ grep 'PINEPHONE' config.aarch64 
# CONFIG_KEYBOARD_PINEPHONE is not set

the CONFIG_KEYBOARD_PINEPHONE option is not set to y for the pinephone kernel build? I would assume that it should be enabled by default or at least configurable wether or not keyboard case support should be enabled or not.

Best regards

[theesm]

I've found the discussions on #452 (should've checked PRs as well before opening this issue). As far as I understand there have been discussions on charging issues as well as wrongly mapped keys dated to early 2022. Since then, the kernelland driver was mainlined earlier this year, and the FAQ at Pinephone Hardware Keyboard now recommends using the kernelland driver:

What is the keyboard driver situation?
Samuel Holland submitted kernel driver for the keyboard > and another for the IP5209 PMIC for inclusion in mainline Linux. These are the drivers that should be used for the keyboard.

Power consumption/charging things seem to have been addressed in a firmware update to the keyboard itself: 2023–02–17: Pinephone keyboard firmware update (1.3).

The PR at #452 seems to package the userland driver & tools, not taking the kernel driver into account.

If there's a chance of getting this merged, I could prepare a PR that enables the kernel driver for the pinephone-pine64 platform and test things on my own hardware. Maybe it should even be configurable wether to utilize keyboard support and if enabled, wether to use the kernel or userland driver for this?

[justinlovinger]

I have not used the latest kernel driver, but earlier versions of the kernel driver worked well on my PinePhone and even had advantages over the userspace drive, like a working meta key. The kernel driver seems to be the future. I am in favor of enabling it.

[samueldr]

Hi, dropping a note here: Someone with the hardware can open a PR to do it the "proper" way they believe, and have other people with the hardware approve.

I don't have the keyboard case.

Note that we probably want to use the same exact implementation details on both pinephones.