"Paul" wrote in message
...
Adam wrote:


Aren't LEDs very-very low power?

You will never be a successful Power Miser engineer
with thinking like this. Every milliamp counts when
you're making the laptop battery last four hours.
No saving is too small.

Couldn't some nice BIOS engineer just add an option to disable keyboard
backlight? :-)

Two parties are involved in the BIOS.

Companies like AMI, Award, Phoenix, Insyde,
write basic BIOS kits for hardware development.
Presumably there is a per-unit license fee,
when the BIOS ships. Some of the lesser hardware
companies, put in their literature "licensed BIOS"
to highlight the fact they actually paid the
license fee :-) At one time, there were companies
that released a BIOS with their product, where
they didn't actually have the rights to it. At
one time, there was even a no-name manufacturer
making fake Asus motherboards :-) And the BIOS
on those wasn't licensed. The whole thing was
cloned.

Asus or Gigabyte or HP or Dell, they can write their
own custom BIOS code if they want. But normally this
is a small small fraction of the code base. And when
AMI, Award, Phoenix, Insyde release a kit, they
don't necessarily give source. If they did, unscrupulous
hardware companies could go off and do derivative works
without paying any fees. As a result, some BIOS bugs
are "hard" to fix, as the BIOS companies themselves release
the bug fix. Other bug fixes, Asus can implement them
immediately (tuning DIMM timings for stable operation,
adding CPU microcode for newer released Intel processors).

So it's a team effort.

The BIOS "kit" has multiple settings. Asus can
hide and unhide settings in the screen. The older the

Hopefully, the keyboard backlight setting is
already in the BIOS "kit" and it's easy for Asus to unhide the setting.

With the keyboard backlight ON, there is insufficient contrast so
I can't tell what the keys are.

For now, the easiest method may be through...

/sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbookPrime


BIOS company is, the more ornate the BIOS screens.
The newer companies have practically no interface
at all in theirs. And it really isn't needed.
That's why my Insyde BIOS laptop, has a grand
total of *one* setting :-) You need a big screen
layout, to handle that baby.

Paul