Bug 680822

Summary:	openSUSE 11.4 Intel 4500MHD screen brightness slightly dim and not easily changeable
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4	Reporter:	Ankleface Wroughtlandmire <bummmm>
Component:	Kernel	Assignee:	Thomas Renninger <trenn>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	forgotten_bwXtNFciSf, mjg59
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	SUSE Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Ankleface Wroughtlandmire 2011-03-18 13:15:08 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b12) Gecko/20110222 Firefox/4.0b12

Hi,

I have an Acer 4810T laptop with Intel 4500MHD graphics running openSUSE 11.4 KDE. I used to run 11.3 for the full 8 months. There is a new bug introduced with 11.4 that makes the screen brightness be slightly dimmer than maximum. It starts off in the first stage of KMS during the bootup, the lizard splash screen appears full brightness in the wrong resolution, then after a few seconds the screen flashes and the lizard appears again with the correct widescreen resolution. At this point the brightness dims slightly. And it it remains that way all the way into the KDE desktop. This is more irritating because the brightness can not be easily changed due to bug #668694. But I have been using the setpci screen brightness workaround. However it constantly reverts back to the slightly dimmer level. After resuming from DPMS power saving, it reverts to a dimmer level, and the same when resuming from suspend.

There is a solution: Install kernel 2.6.38 from the kernel repo, and it behaves the same as the 11.3 kernel which didn't have the bug.

Thanks for looking into this.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1 Brandon Philips 2011-03-30 18:57:12 UTC

Isn't this just providing more info on bug #668694. Closing as DUPLICATE. Please add this comment to that bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 668694 ***

Comment 2 Ankleface Wroughtlandmire 2011-04-01 05:19:43 UTC

Hi, no this is not a duplicate of bug #668964.  That bug is about not being able to dim the screen.  This bug is about the screen dimming automatically and by default.

Comment 3 Jeff Mahoney 2011-04-15 19:30:41 UTC

It's two symptoms of the same problem. Closing as a dupe.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 668694 ***

Comment 4 Thomas Renninger 2011-04-16 18:54:42 UTC

> Install kernel 2.6.38 from the kernel repo
Rui/Matthew: Do you eventually have an idea which patch came in between 2.6.37 and 2.6.38 fixing this (which might even be worth to submit it to stable@)?

Comment 5 Ankleface Wroughtlandmire 2011-05-30 13:18:10 UTC

Hi Thomas, thanks very much for looking into this.

I just wanted to report that this bug is back for 2.6.39 from the openSUSE KERNEL repo.

It's just bouncing back and forth between broken and fixed.

I maintain that this bug is NOT a duplicate bug 668694.

Comment 6 Thomas Renninger 2011-06-01 12:03:19 UTC

I am rather busy right now.
Our kotd is more or less the mainline kernel. To be sure you can test a -vanilla flavored kernel (without any suse patches) to be sure it's a mainline problem.
You could then open a bugzilla.kernel.org bug and pointing to this one for reference.
Rui/Mjg should be more aware about recent mainline changes in this area than I am. Best still wait a bit, maybe someone still points you/us to something to try.

Comment 7 Thomas Renninger 2011-06-01 12:07:24 UTC

Could be related to:
[Bug 36322] acer-wmi / Acer Travelmate 5760 not supported
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36322

Comment 8 Thomas Renninger 2012-05-24 12:36:50 UTC

Looks like there is some progress on the mainline bug.
The patch is probably not applied yet, as soon as it is and we sync up (we do regularly), it can be tested by installing a kernel from here:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/vanilla/standard/x86_64

Whether it is going to be pushed is currently discussed in this thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/platform-driver-x86@vger.kernel.org/msg03154.html

I'd like to close this one fixed already.
I am currently browsing through my bugs and need to get an overview.
If the issue is still not resolved, please report to:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org
in first place. We need the stuff to be fixed in the mainline kernel for maintenance reasons.