Toshiba Hybrid Laptop

Some results from testing a hybrid Toshiba laptop at the London get-together, June 1-3, 2015.

Ingredients of the laptop

  • Detachable screen functioning as tablet, keyboard functioning as docking station. As we discovered later, the screen can also be attached in flipped orientation, covering up the keyboard, so you essentially use it as just an extra battery pack
  • Two batteries, one in the screen, one in the keyboard
  • Bluetooth
  • Accelerometer
  • Ambient light sensor
  • Compass
  • Two cameras
  • Quad-core M-5Y71
  • Broadwell graphics
  • Wacom digitizer with pen

Where the devices will be used

  • Accelerometer: gnome-settings-daemon rotates the screen according to orientation, gnome-shell shows an orientation lock button
  • Ambient light sensor: gnome-settings-daemon adjusts the screen brightness, gnome-control-center shows an 'Automatic screen brightness' switch (requires master branches)
  • Compass: geoclue will expose this information to applications, and gnome-maps may use it to point north (geoclue patch needs to be rebased)
  • Two cameras: both cameras will show up in cheese and can be selected

Testing

  • Batteries both show up as 'main' - there's a patch that fixes this

  • Front-facing camera does not work - a kernel patch to fix this is on its way

  • Cheese not handling multiple cameras very elegantly - bug

  • The accelerometer was going crazy on orientation changes, it kept changing the orientation for ~10 minutes after we stopped changing it
    • It seems to be a problem in the IIO HID sensor code which doesn't take "exponent scale" into account
  • The ambient light sensor is working ok with iio-sensor-proxy. One issue was that it went all the way to black
  • Many function keys on the keyboard are not wired up
  • Keyboard backlight
  • The general feeling of the machine is laggy, the graphics are really slow
    • This seems to be due to the firmware detecting Linux as a "non-ACPI OS" and switching to the maximum power saving mode. Making changes in the firmware setup for "maximum performance" fixes it
  • Wacom digitizer
    • works out of the box, there's a pen hidden in the screen
    • palm detection does not work when using the pen, so there's some interference

  • Bluetooth turns itself back on whenever you turn it off: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93911

Hardware/ToshibaHybrid (last edited 2015-06-09 12:56:05 by BastienNocera)