Ubuntu 24.10 - Brightness not working on Dell G15 RTX 3060

Graphics / Linux Linux
1

Coming from this thread, proposed solution stopped working after updating to 24.04

ls -l /sys/class/backlight

total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Nov 10 19:16 nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/PNP0C14:00/wmi_bus/wmi_bus-PNP0C14:00/603E9613-EF25-4338-A3D0-C46177516DB7/backlight/nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight

nvidia-smi


+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 560.35.03              Driver Version: 560.35.03      CUDA Version: 12.6     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 ...    Off |   00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   48C    P8             10W /   55W |       9MiB /   6144MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A    394970      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                            2MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Relevant lines in /etc/default/grub/ (here I reverted the changes proposed in the previous thread, as they no longer allowed me to change brigtness with light command)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

…and this is what I’ve found after running dmesg


[523388.254114] __vm_enough_memory: pid: 1845120, comm: nvidia-smi, bytes: 51539607552 not enough memory for the allocation
[523388.254122] __vm_enough_memory: pid: 1845120, comm: nvidia-smi, bytes: 51539644416 not enough memory for the allocation
[523388.254126] __vm_enough_memory: pid: 1845120, comm: nvidia-smi, bytes: 51539742720 not enough memory for the allocation

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance!

2

My nvidia-bug-report.sh output
nvidia-bug-report (2).log (4.4 MB)

(problem as outlined is that I cannot change brightness as the controls doesn’t work)

3

Solutions tried so far:

  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=video"
  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=native"
  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=nvidia_wmi_ec"
  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia.NVreg_RegistryDwords=EnableBrightnessControl=1"
  • GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash NVreg_OpenRmEnableUnsupportedGpus=1"

None of them worked out.

4

@rrameshbabu could you maybe help with this brightness problem as well?

5

@ourensan we started looking at a potential improvement for this in Bug 5064785 internally. We unfortunately do not have every laptop out there, but I am hoping that the work on that bug could resolve your issue. We, however, could share patches with you early on to try out on top of our open drivers, GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source, ahead of our driver releases to help verify the proposed solution.

1 Like
6

@rrameshbabu Thanks for that, really appreciate it. Apologize for my ignorance, but what should I do in order to help testing the patches? Should I simply download the latest release and install it, or something else?

7

We would need you to be able to compile from source and install the driver directly from GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source. We have some instructions here, GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source. If you have a linux distribution that already has a package that installs from this GitHub repo, you might be able to apply the patches to its packaging. Basically, we would share a git patch/commit you can apply on top of our repository, rebuilt, and then test the driver with said patch.

1 Like
8

@ourensan I was hoping you could try some experiments to help me confirm a couple things.

  1. Can you try setting acpi_backlight=native again, checking whether you can or cannot set brightness, and share the output of /proc/cmdline with us?
  2. After that, could you verify whether you are able to change the brightness with nvidia_wm_ec_backlight instead? (using the sysfs nodes under /sys/class/backlight/nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight)
  3. If that does not work, can you try blacklisting nvidia_wm_ec_backlight and see if that enables you to set the brightness on your laptop?
9

Switching it back to native and updating grub with the latest driver worked like charm. Finally my eyes can rest. Thanks so much for that!!!

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.11.0-13-generic root=UUID=b5c29081-8fed-4c63-987a-be7b40b805bb ro quiet splash acpi_backlight=native crashkernel=2G-4G:320M,4G-32G:512M,32G-64G:1024M,64G-128G:2048M,128G-:4096M vt.handoff=7

10

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