brightness keys act as if repeated many times, locks keyboard

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

This is possibly a duplicate of bug 261721, at least in part. But it's not quite the same, so I'm erring on the side of filing a separate bug rather than cluttering an existing one. I'm also not certain that the bug lies in gnome-power-manager rather than somewhere more fundamental.

When I tap Fn+Up or Fn+Down on my Dell Inspiron 630m to change brightness, about 90% of the time the brightness OSD will slide right to an extreme, as if I'd held down or repeated tapped the key. After some seconds this OSD finally disappears (it's as if the keys are still being pressed for maybe 3-5 seconds after my initial tap), but my keyboard focus has gone missing. Just like wgrant's bug 261721, I get no caret or other sign of a functioning keyboard in X until I switch to another VT — although unlike 261721, when this happens usually it will switch back to X without me needing to do anything. That is, when this happens, I can hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 and the screen will go black for a second, then my X session reappears, the windows very quickly redraw and my keyboard is functional again. Another after-effect of this bug is that the notification icon is absent. (Normally, VT switching works normally, without this instant switch-back behaviour.)

Another after-effect is that the gpm notification icon is no longer visible. I have to kill and restart the gnome-power-manager process to get it back.

I'm attaching the output of "gnome-power-manager --verbose --no-daemon 2>&1 | tee gpm.debug.log.txt". It shows 1472 lines saying "Button press event type=brightness-up", but I only pressed this button once!

It also shows many lines like "Key 10 not found in hash" afterwards, which appears to be what happens to all my keypresses until I switch VTs. I guess the keyboard driver/controller/something has been left in the wrong state, and that VT switching resets that state?

This all worked flawlessly in hardy.

For completeness, here's the gnome-power-bugreport.sh output:

andrew@steerpike:~$ gnome-power-bugreport.sh
Distro version: DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu intrepid (development branch)"
Kernel version: 2.6.27-7-generic
g-p-m version: 2.24.0
HAL version: 0.5.11
System manufacturer: missing
System version: missing
System product: missing
AC adapter present: yes
Battery present: yes
Laptop panel present: yes
CPU scaling present: yes
Battery Information:
  battery.charge_level.current = 33577 (0x8329) (int)
  battery.charge_level.design = 79920 (0x13830) (int)
  battery.charge_level.last_full = 33577 (0x8329) (int)
  battery.charge_level.percentage = 100 (0x64) (int)
  battery.charge_level.rate = 11 (0xb) (int)
  battery.is_rechargeable = true (bool)
  battery.model = 'DELL FC1415' (string)
  battery.present = true (bool)
  battery.rechargeable.is_charging = false (bool)
  battery.rechargeable.is_discharging = false (bool)
  battery.reporting.current = 7200 (0x1c20) (int)
  battery.reporting.design = 7200 (0x1c20) (int)
  battery.reporting.last_full = 3025 (0xbd1) (int)
  battery.reporting.rate = 1 (0x1) (int)
  battery.reporting.technology = 'Li-ion' (string)
  battery.reporting.unit = 'mAh' (string)
  battery.serial = '1388' (string)
  battery.technology = 'lithium-ion' (string)
  battery.type = 'primary' (string)
  battery.vendor = 'SMP-SDI2.4' (string)
  battery.voltage.current = 12415 (0x307f) (int)
  battery.voltage.design = 11100 (0x2b5c) (int)
  battery.voltage.unit = 'mV' (string)
GNOME Power Manager Process Information:
andrew 6823 0.3 1.4 40500 14732 ? Ss 10:54 0:00 /usr/bin/gnome-power-manager
HAL Process Information:
117 5392 0.0 0.3 6440 3512 ? Ss Oct13 0:54 /usr/sbin/hald
root 5397 0.0 0.0 3364 956 ? S Oct13 0:11 \_ hald-runner
root 5479 0.0 0.1 5208 1132 ? S Oct13 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-dell-backlight
root 5488 0.0 0.0 3436 804 ? S Oct13 0:01 \_ hald-addon-input: Listening on /dev/input/event5 /dev/input/event6 /dev/input/event3 /dev/input/event2 /dev/input/event4 /dev/input/event1
root 5492 0.0 0.0 3448 700 ? S Oct13 0:00 \_ /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-cpufreq