Comment 132 for bug 1283589

I've helped Daniele debugging the issue from LMS to kernel level. And on his laptop (Samsung NP900X4C-A03US) the LMS doesn't work.

syslog entry:
LMS: Cannot connect to Intel AMT via MEI driver

We've debugged it further down and the MEI ioctl "IOCTL_MEI_CONNECT_CLIENT" fails.

$ strace -e ioctl -p `pidof -s lms`
Process 6109 attached
ioctl(5, HIDIOCGRDESCSIZE or HIDIOCGVERSION or SNDRV_HWDEP_IOCTL_INFO,
0x7fff86321af0) = -1 ENODEV (No such device)

The kernel returns -ENODEV in drivers/misc/mei/main.c, function mei_ioctl().

We've brought this issue to Tomas Winkler as he is the driver maintainer:

$ scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f drivers/misc/mei/main.c
Tomas Winkler <email address hidden> (supporter:INTEL MANAGEMENT...)

He says that the system is not a (by hardware) vPRO (AMT) enabled system. This is why the driver refuses the LMS to connect. There are other possible MEI usages with less functionality. These are displayed under:
<debugfs>/mei/meclients.

So it looks like Samsung has a special MEI client software running on the systems where AMT or LMS can't be used.

Tomas has sent this issue to the Intel support. But no response, yet. IMHO he should know best what's going on with this hardware. :-/

I would look at hardware access in the driver (setting activation bits. etc.). Perhaps it can be solved by custom kernel hacking.