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Hi everybody,
I have a problem with gnome 3 forcing my backlight brightness to 100% at each boot, despite the fact I'm forcing brightness value in /sys during boot.
I've searched in this forum and g**gled a lot, but can't find anyone having similar issue.
My laptop is an HP Elitebook 8440p. It embeds a Nvidia gfx controller (and I'm using Nvidia proprietary driver)
Fn keys for backlight control are working fine out of the box.
Let me detail the issue:
- As gnome 3 is unable to store the brightness value from boot to boot (looks to be a known issue of gnome 3?), I've workaround it by forcing the brightness to desired value by "echoing" it to /sys during boot in rc.local (or using tmpfiles.d, both giving same result):
$ echo 6 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
- If I boot in console mode (no gdm), this is working as expected: after boot, brightness level is 6 and I can use Fn keys to adjust it.
- If I boot in console mode (no gdm) and just start X (running xclock for example), this is also working as expected: in X, brightness level is 6 and I can use Fn keys to adjust it.
- If I start gdm, brightness is increased to 100%.
Once in gnome-shell with full backlight brightness, if I check the backlight brightness in /sys, I get:
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
$ 6
But clearly, the real brightness level of the display is not 6!!! (but probably 24, which is the max value).
Then, if I echo 6 in the /sys/.../brightness again, the backlight is decreased to the correct value. Same thing if I press the Fn key: brightness value suddenly decrease to the correct value (doesn't step to 23 but rather to a value close to 6).
I've tried several tricks I've found in this forum and in the wiki, but with no success:
- adding
acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=legacy
to kernel parameters doesn't change anything.
- adding
acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor
to kernel parameters just break the Fn keys but doesn't change anything else.
- adding brighntess control to nvidia drivers in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
doesn't change anything either.
- trying to play with xbacklight doesn't work. When called, xbacklight doesn't answer with any error, doesn't answer anything either, and doesn't change the backlight brightness at all.
In /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/ there is other files like "bl_power" (write) and "actual_brightness" (read only). "actual_brightness" always reflect the value as in /sys/.../brightness. Even when the backlight is obviously at 100%, it tells me 6. "bl_power" seems to have no effect.
My conclusions of all those experiments make me think that:
- It doesn't looks to be HW related. HW is working (Fn keys ok, /sys control of brightness ok).
- It doesn't looks to be related to X server (it's ok with X without gnome).
- It is coming from something inside or started by gdm/gnome 3.
So, two questions come to my mind:
1. Who in gdm/gnome is pushing my backlight brightness to 100% at each boot?
2. Why the hell do I read 6 in /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness when it is clearly higher than this on screen?
There is still the option of writing a script started by gdm to echo the correct value in /sys, but this is not elegant and I would prefer to understand what is really happening here (this is one of the reason why I choose Arch: to have the control of my system and understand how it works).
Thank you for any suggestion that could help me!!
Last edited by tetsuo41 (2012-09-24 19:42:18)
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This is because gnome-settings-daemon overrides your settings, so all your scripts are rendered useless once you login. In order to preserve backlight settings across reboots you should do the following:
Once in Gnome, adjust brightness as per your taste using Fn keys then open a terminal and run:
/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper --get-brightness
That should return a number corresponding to the brightness level you've just set (e.g. 6). Then run:
gnome-session-properties
then Add a new startup program -- enter a name (e.g. brightnessctrl) and the following command:
pkexec /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper --set-brightness 6
where 6 is the number you got from the first command. Now brightness settings should stick across reboots.
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Thank you don_crissti!
This is working fine. I'm tagging this post as [SOLVED].
This still doesn't explain who is increasing the backlight or why the value read from /sys/.../backlight is not good after gnome start (gsd-backlight-helper gives same value as in /sys by the way), but at least I'm not stuck anymore!
Thank you for the trick, I hope this helps someone else too!
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This might be of help if you would like to debug it further:
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Thank you Haikarainen.
Nice script!
This actually does the same thing I was doing, writing brightness value in /sys/class/backlight/ device.
My concern was more about finding who is changing my brightness since I only have one device in /sys/class/backlight/ and the value in it is always reflecting actual brightness, except after gnome boot.
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Hi, guys
I was wondering, if there is also a simple solution for this backlight issue on XFCE.
Fn Keys work fine and I am able to set backlight with: 'xbacklight = 40%'.
What I tried is a systemd script that is executed on login. That did not work. (Sorry for not examining the root cause of *why* it is not working)
don_crissti's solution for gnome seems very clean. Is there something similar for XFCE?
Just as an idea, I would like to save the current backlight level on shutdown and restore the same level on boot if possible.
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I am encountering the same issue.
I don't know if it's GDM, but when logging out or shutting down, brightness gets set to 100%.
systemd-backlight.@service still saves the value, but that doesn't help, since the value is already wrong when the service fires.
I don't really want to hack around the problem, but would like to find out what actually causes this.
Any idea for further investigations?
Edit: Same issue with lxdm.
Last edited by user1391 (2014-08-15 14:01:38)
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I am also interested in an XFCE solution.
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