Arch Linux

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

Hi all,

I have recently installed Arch on my Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 tablet, based on Intel Broadwell Y SoC. I'm happy to say that most features work, including:
- battery+keyboard dock, including function buttons and touchpad
- both batteries are detected and reported by Gnome, and I get a correct overview of % left
- sound (had to play a bit with alsamixer to make it work; have not tested headphones or microphone yet)
- touchscreen (though multitouch gestures in Gnome / Chromium seem quite limited / not present - cannot pinch-zoom in Chromium for ex.)
- video acceleration in Chromium (enabled software rendering override in flags)
- brightness control
- audio buttons

There are issues though and I'd be happy if the community could point me at the right directions regarding how to solve these (if at all possible):

• Issue 1 (major): power button does not work, nothing is logged in journalctl when I press it and even acpi_listen does not print anything.

• Issue 2 (major): if I put the tablet into sleep, it will fail to resume. It ends up rebooting. So I cannot turn off the screen by locking or timeout (since power button does not work) - this will cause a reboot.

• Issue 3 (minor): audio buttons on the tablet seem to work strangely - they act once when pressed and then act again in a second. So every press translates into two volume changes. acpi_listen only shows one line per button press, while on-screen volume popup shows that volume changes 2 times (and volume changes 2 times in fact). However acpi_listen does not show for ex. when the button is held for a while while system interprets this and changes volume until the button is released. obviously acpi_listen does not provide all the events.

• Issue 4 (minor): I'm using Gnome and I see how it is not optimized for touch - the onscreen keyboard it provides is plain terrible, only a-z 0-9 on it. It also pop-up even when I have keyboard dock connected. Any options here? Maybe a different Window Manager which provides better touch support then Gnome?

• Issue 5 (minor): wifi with NetworkManager - it works, but the first attempt to connect to any network fails. Second attempt succeedes. No such issue if using wifi-menu

Also, I wonder if automatic screen rotation is possible, but I have not researched this question at all yet

Another thing to note is that Issues 1, 2 and 3 are also present in Android-x86 which I tried recently. It uses kernel 4.0.9 if I am not mistaken.

Any advice appreciated!

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

One thing worth mentioning about Issue 2 (sleep / suspend) - in fact sleep (S3) does not work even in Windows. The only mode which works for this device (and I suspect for all Broadwell-Y devices) is "connected standby", I searched a bit about it's support in Linux and seems we are not there yet...

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

"freeze" state seems to work (expected).

echo "freeze" > /sys/power/state

Probably S3 will just not work, not supported by hardware, so I'll live with that for now. I suspect that my device is similar to Surface Pro 3 in terms of hw, I'll check https://github.com/shvr/fedora-surface-pro-3-kernel, maybe I can find patches which fix my issues.

ThePagel

Member

Registered: 2014-12-29

Posts: 3

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

touchscreen (though multitouch gestures in Gnome / Chromium seem quite limited / not present - cannot pinch-zoom in Chromium for ex.)

I cannot get touch to work for me on the venue 11 pro. Did you have to do anything special or did it just work?
*edit*
Well I updated the kernel and it's working now.

Last edited by ThePagel (2016-02-03 03:17:18)

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

ThePagel,

Good to hear.

I wanted to share some updates:

With the latest kernel 4.3.3 there are two regressions compared to 4.2.5:
- onboard audio has disappeared from audio devices - now only HDMI is available
- shutdown/restart is now broken, tablet does not turn off, stops after "kvm: exiting hardware virtualization", Keypresses are reflected in console, so it's not a freeze but something gets stuck
- freeze stopped working too (may be related to the above regression with shutdown) - there are crash dumps in logs when I close the lid - every minute or so, and logs keep saying that freeze failed (first suspend fails, then freeze keeps failing),

I have found a fix for the power button - https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102281 - there's a patch in the first attachment created by Jan-Michael Brummer. Looks like it was not merged upstream. Last update from Jan-Michael Brummer was "In the meantime i will post my driver patch on the pm-linux maillist. Thanks." but I could not find a relevant discussion in linux-pm mail archives - maybe he forgot or something else happened. I think I will port his patch myself and hope it gets merged

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

Actually, now that I have updated to the currently available kernel 4.4.1, I see the following:

- sound is back and actually working out of the box now
- headphones are now detected but no sound through them, will check if this can be fixed via mixer settings
- shutdown / restart works
- freeze works
- closing the lid will trigger suspend which is known not to work -> tablet freezes. I guess I can configure that though, will do some research.

So looks like things got better with linux 4.4.1 compared to 4.2.5, which I'm happy to announce.

*UPD*

Seems like there's a new issue - with graphics. Display starts to glitch heavily at some point - sometimes it recovers after a while, sometimes not, can turn on and off at random, graphics all screwed, etc, like a badly synced VGA screen %) Will check if this can be fixed by installing newer intel video drivers (if they exist)...

Last edited by f3flight (2016-02-03 09:02:09)

f3flight

Member

Registered: 2015-03-04

Posts: 27

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

After installing xf86-video-intel (initially was not installed) the graphical glitches went away (had to reboot).

Also, I have built a kernel (based on 4.4.1) with the patch for the power button - and now the power button works! I still have to find a way to switch system from doing suspend into doing freeze, I have created a separate thread about this - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208402

*UPD* The thread above is now solved, the answer is there about how to change suspend-to-ram("mem") into suspend-to-idle("freeze"). Now I have the power button working and I can finally use the tablet without the dock since I can turn the screen off without turning off the system I also can dual-boot into Windows or Arch without a keyboard - because I have installed Arch on a microSD, and set it's EFI loader (I use sysyemd-boot) as the first. So when I take out the microSD I can boot into Windows, when I put it back I boot into Arch.

Hardware issues still present:
- headphones audio is glitchy at best - have to play hard with alsamixer to make it work, and even then it is mono only. Although with the latest update I am now able to connect to my bluetooth dongle and use headphones this way.
- I wonder if the tablet can support "standby"(S1) mode instead of "freeze"(S0). It is not listed in the output of `cat /sys/power/state` so with current kernel it is not supported, but maybe it's possible to make it work - will check what is the state of standby support for Surface Pro 3...
- Sometimes the tablet freezes. I am not yet sure if this is because of my configuration tests on the running system or this can also happen during normal activity.

And then there are software issues, first of all bad touchscreen interaction support and bad HiDPI support in Linux. Today I was introduced to the "onboard" touchscreen keyboard, looks promising, will try to make it work instead of Gnome's default terrible on-screen kb. There are also problems with resizing windows via touch (not really possible) and with rotated screen (cannot resize windows at all when screen is rotated).

Last edited by f3flight (2016-02-03 21:05:34)

ThePagel

Member

Registered: 2014-12-29

Posts: 3

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

I'm going to do a fresh install soon and will report back about the headphones issue. I read a week or so ago that you can get pinch zoom to work in Chromium by editing Chromiums configuration file.

archfluke

Member

Registered: 2016-06-08

Posts: 39

Re: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Core M 5Y71) - works, but some issues present

I've been having issues with it powering off while shutting down as reported here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=212761 .  Has anyone else had this issue with their Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 and resolved it?  I also had audio issues where it only worked on one boot out of 20ish.  Cheers!

EDIT: it works now!  I just happened to somehow have kept the ESP from my previous build when I was cloning my drive and somehow generating another ESP.  I just deleted one of the ESPs and then fixed my fstab to reflect the UUID of the correct fstab and all my headphones/speakers/shutdown woes went away!

Last edited by archfluke (2017-04-14 05:19:06)