[Bug 326986] [NEW] Key stuck with Samsung IR remote (USB 0419:0001)

[thsths]

Public bug reported:

I have a Samsung IR remote that should work as a USB HID device. I need
to do some tweaking with modprobe options in /etc/modprobe.d/options to
get it recognised (see options), and then it mostly works. However, once
I press one of the upper keys, the X server becomes unresponsive.
Unloading and reloading the LKM hiddev solves the issue, until one of
the offending keys is pressed.

Using xinput from a remote system, I was able to figure out that X
becomes unresponsive because it thinks that key 123 is still pressed
(see xinput-query-state-3.log.gz).

I looked further into this, and I found that the HID input layer creates
this effect. For one key press, the trace from the device looks normal
(see rawhid.dump), but the "sanitized" version (see hiddev-before.dump)
shows a key press event for e9 at the end. I am no expert of the HID
spec, but it seems that the device uses a seriously broken definition. I
turned on HID debugging to get this definition (see kern.log.gz). Field
4 has an offset of 0, so the first key becomes indistinguishable from no
key press - and the kernel gets confused by this.

I had a go at this problem, and the patch (see hid-core.patch) fixes the
problem for me. The new output does not have the spurious key press
event (see hiddev-after.dump). Now I am not sure that this is a best
fix, or that it has no side effect, but it works for me. Maybe it would
be better to raise the minimum? And even with this fix, there are three
buttons that I cannot get to works. But I have been tracing the USB
connection, and I cannot figure out how they could possibly work, so I
will leave that for now.

My system is an up to date Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64, running kernels from
2.6.27-7 down to -11 (with the same problem). The Samsung remote must be
a different model from the one the kernel quirk refers to, because the
definition looks very different from what the quirk is dealing with.
Maybe Samsung tried to fix the earlier issues, but they introduced a new
one. Of course it is a shame that the USB ID is still the same.

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Key stuck with Samsung IR remote (USB 0419:0001)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/326986
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