Keyboard inoperable after I messed with 10-amdgpu.conf

[anarchoN3rd]

Issue:

Keys on built-in laptop keyboard are not working

Logs:

inxi
journalctl
cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep fail | eos-sendlog - the EOS tutorial post for sharing logs made me nervous about doing this manually, so I added the grep fail. If this is not enough information, please let me know, or if I need to share any other logs.

Cause:

While trying to get my brightness controls working on my laptop, I found this tutorial and did the following:

After finding the name of my backlight by running ls /sys/class/backlight/, I then edited /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf/:

Here is that file prior to me editing it:

Section "OutputClass"
	Identifier "AMDgpu"
	MatchDriver "amdgpu"
	Driver "amdgpu"
EndSection

And what I added:

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "card0"
        Driver      "amdgpu"
        Option      "Backlight"  "amdgpu_bl1"
        BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"

Just like that. And then I logged out, as the article says. I was immediatly greeted with a black screen and a blinking cursor. As you may have noticed… I failed to include the EndSection

I eventually found my mistake and fixed it via console. I added that last element, and rebooted again, but no cigar. I booted back to console and totally removed the code I added and it booted up fine. But…my keyboard is no longer working. Like, no keys at all. The power button seems to be the only thing functioning. I also noticed that my trackpad is enabled again, which I wrote a script to disable and added to i3wm config to trigger on startup. This was working fine prior to this event.

All usb devices are working. I am currently typing this on the laptop with a usb keyboard.

My thoughts

I have no clue how PCI id’s are allocated, but I was wondering whether or not PCI:0:2:0 belongs to a specific device, and maybe that device was my keyboard, and I took it’s id “slot” with the backlight.

lspci | eos-sendlog

00:02.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge

That is the closest thing I could find to the id I was told to use. Again, not sure how PCI device alocation works.

Please let me know if there is any more information needed. Thanks ahead of time to anyone that can offer some help.

Edit

Forgot to mention that the keyboard works on the login screen as well as inside of Xfce.

[anarchoN3rd]

I figured it out. Somehow in the process of reconfiguring the brightness control, the xinput id’s got redistributed and the keyboard got id 17, which was my touchpad’s id before. So now my script was disabling my keyboard instead.

I still have no idea why this happened, though. Could someone please point me in the direction of some search terms to use to learn more? The link between PCI id’s and xinput makes sense, but they seem to have different configuration processes, at least from my beginners perspective.

[anthony93]

For brightness control, there is a lightweight tool called brightnessctl, which is available in the community repo. If you are using i3wm, you simply have to add two keybindings that call brightnessctl. For example:

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl -q set +5%
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl -q 5%-

I wasn’t aware you have to mess around with X Server configuration files to enable backlight…

[anarchoN3rd]

That was just what I found while searching. I think I saw brightnessctl mentioned once in relation to someone’s extension they built for it.

Thank you. This is definitely the way to go, but I messed around with it the other night and can’t seem to get it to work. I added my user to the video group, but running the command seems to have no effect, even running it as sudo. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually though.

But, I’m having more problems than that. I was connecting fine to my home wifi yesterday, but now it reads “no default interface” in the bar and I cannot connect to the internet. I may have done more damage than I expected. At this point I might just backup my data and install a fresh instance of eos