Bug 304979

Summary: fbdev: cannot change brightness level after switching from X to console and back
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 10.3 Reporter: Christopher Stender <cstender>
Component: X.OrgAssignee: Stefan Dirsch <sndirsch>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact: E-mail List <xorg-maintainer-bugs>
Severity: Minor    
Priority: P5 - None CC: abittner, bgeuken
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---
Attachments: xorg.con
Xorg.0.log

Description Christopher Stender 2007-08-27 19:10:40 UTC
I cannot change the brightness level anymore if I switch from X to console and back to X. This seems to be Thinkpad related, because I cannot reproduce this with a fsc notebook. After a forced X restart, I can change the brightness level again.

I'm not sure if this is a X problem, but it looks like that. xorg.conf lists the fbdev driver.
Comment 1 Christopher Stender 2007-08-27 19:25:05 UTC
This seems to be related to the fbdev driver. After I installed the ati-fglrx driver, I can change the brightness level even if I switched to console before.
Comment 2 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-27 19:30:02 UTC
Attach /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
Comment 3 Christopher Stender 2007-08-27 19:39:22 UTC
Created attachment 160094 [details]
xorg.con
Comment 4 Christopher Stender 2007-08-27 19:39:45 UTC
Created attachment 160095 [details]
Xorg.0.log
Comment 5 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-27 19:51:37 UTC
Did this work before with fbdev driver?
Comment 6 Christopher Stender 2007-08-27 22:35:57 UTC
I'm not sure, because the whole brightness stuff (thinkpad_acpi and kpowersave) was broken before. If I find some time I can install an alpha version if this helps? IIRC it works in 10.2.
Comment 7 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-28 01:53:41 UTC
No need to install an alpha version. You think it worked in 10.2. Were you using fbdev or fglrx on 10.2?
Comment 8 Christopher Stender 2007-08-28 06:58:25 UTC
I did a testrun on my private workstation (openSUSE 10.2). It works with both, fbdev and fglrx. In openSUSE 10.3 it only works with !fbdev.
Comment 9 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-28 14:32:18 UTC
evtest /dev/input/event0 doesn't show any keycodes when pressing these keys, but "showkey -s" shows the following scancodes:

brightness up:   0xe0 0x54 0xe0 0xd4
brightness down: 0xe0 0x4c 0xe0 0xcc

Comment 10 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-28 14:44:10 UTC
After restart of fbdev driver brightness control works again, so something seems to be wrong in the VT switch code of fbdev driver?
Comment 11 Stefan Dirsch 2007-08-28 15:10:21 UTC
minor issue. Most users are not satisfied with fbdev driver anyway ...
Comment 12 Christopher Stender 2007-08-28 15:25:03 UTC
Well, you have to use it until the ati-fglrx is usable :(

Btw: you know that thinkpads change the brightness in hardware? So it seems that fbdev overwrites some values...
Comment 13 Stefan Dirsch 2007-11-25 16:06:49 UTC
The fbdev driver does not reset any brightness bits of the GPU. This issue can only be fixed by a proper native graphics driver like radeonhd. Possibly you get better results with using the vesa driver. If it worked with 10.2, you were lucky. I can't see a reason for this.

Please understand WONTFIX as CANNOTFIX and please give radeonhd driver at least a try. Thanks.