Keyboard Backlight Control on Lenovo Ideapad & Xiaoxin Models

Ever found the keyboard backlight annoying? It keeps turnning on when booting Windows, and there is no configuration to disable it permanently in any Lenovo Utilities.

Just did some reverse engineering to find how to control keyboard backlight programmatically. The principal is simple, use \\.\EnergyDrv device exposed by Lenovo ACPI energy management driver. It is capable of controlling all keyboard backlight levels. Also other capabilities available 🙂 . See code:

Should built and run on any C99 compilers. Run with <app.exe> [0|1|2|3]. You can add it to task scheduler to disable keyboard backlight on startup.

Also checked other approaches. The usb/hid way does not work on an ideapad. The Keyboard_Core.dll hack also does not work, I cannot find the file in drivers.

Benchmark for Web Frameworks (2)

Actually a simple note to the previous article.

– C: libevent seems to give best performance, but also low level.
– C++: drogon has websocket support, but no sse. async.
– C++: poco is sync.
– C++: workflow is low level, hard to use. wfrest has convenient apis, sse support in trunk.
– C++: boost/beast has poor performance, and cannot utilize multi-core cpu.
– C++: oatpp is async, but complex framework.
– Better use high level languages like Java or Go if running a web application.

Using vcpkg for C++ Package Management

Verified on CentOS7 and Windows 10.

1. Install v2ray and run proxy

v2ray unblocks github access from mainland China. Install v2ray clients and set IE proxy _only_ on Windows, bootstrap.bat & vcpkg.exe picks it automatically.

2. Download vcpkg from github and bootstrap

Download from: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/releases

Export vcpkg-2022.08.15 directory as ${VCPKG_ROOT}.

3. Install drogon framework for demo

The drogon framework is a high performance application framework, including client & server supports. vcpkg builds static(*.a) library by default, use x64-linux-dynamic for dynamic(*.so) library. The repo version requires g++-8 to build, install from CentOS SCL:

To build with g++-7, manually install boost-filesystem package in vcpkg, and edit ${VCPKG_ROOT}/ports/drogon/portfile.cmake and comment out:

On Windows, open the command line for Visual Studio develop environment.

If openssl build fails, run:

If other errors, try to update to recent github ports. In my case, libmariadb build failed, that have been fixed in master.

4. Export drogon framework

5. Add a demo program

Linux dynamic build is community supported, invoke cmake with:

Now build with make or Visual Studio.

6. Stick to a specific version

add a vcpkg.json file:

It sticks to drogon 1.8.0 and openssl 1.1.1n. ${VCPKG_ROOT} now required to be a git repository. In your project directory, install specific versions of libraries by running:

Run cmake:

Now ldd output shows openssl 1.1 (default build is 3.0):

The only difference is the existence of vcpkg.json file, when using versioning.

7. Binary caching

If you change the root path of vcpkg, better clean up the cache, or build may fail. It’s $HOME/.cache/vcpkg/archives under Linux, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\vcpkg\archives under Windows.

Coroutines in C++/Boost

Starting with 1.56, boost/asio provides asio::spawn() to work with coroutines. Just paste the sample code here, with minor modifications:

The Python in my previous article can be used to work with the code above. I also tried to write a TCP server with only boost::coroutines classes. select() is used, since I want the code to be platform independent. NOTE: with coroutines, we have only _one_ thread.

Basic Usage of Boost MultiIndex Containers

Just take a simple note here.
The Boost Multi-index Containers Library provides a class template named multi_index_container which enables the construction of containers maintaining one or more indices with different sorting and access semantics.

Output:

To use with pointer values, only limited change needed as highlighted: