Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

frank604 · 2016-01-20 01:20:55

zetxx wrote:

frank604 wrote:
Guys, I am super stoked. A little bit off topic but... my xps 13 is finally coming back from RMA. Due to arrive on the 12th! Just sayin'
On a side note, any new issues brought up from new rc's?
Glad to here that from you

Thanks!

Well, I got my xps back but then quickly realized when I was partitioning that they replaced my NVME with a M.2 SATA. UGH. Sending back again but this really sucks. I only have my work computer and my phone

Last edited by frank604 (2016-01-20 01:23:27)

eNauz · 2016-01-21 09:22:07

Hi folks!

I wanted to share my installation procedure with you as there were some unforeseen issues that were not directly addressed in the Wiki or in this thread.

I'm going with the XPS13 9350 QHD model with i7, 16GB RAM and 512GB NVMe and the latest BIOS 1.1.9.

Pre-Requirement: Enter Setup and switch Secure Boot to off and SATA mode to AHCI.

First I was even unable get to the installer. Adding kernel parameter

i915_preliminary_hardware_support=1

did not change the behavior. The screen just went blank in 100% of the boots. However, connecting an external monitor just worked fine, so I concluded that there was something wrong with display settings. After struggling for days I could boot the installer by using the kernel parameter

nomodeset

(who would have expected ). So in a nutshell, for whatever reason, the installer did not deal with my QHD display. Can someone reproduce this?

Than I could install arch as usual with an encrypted BTRFS partition following this guide (thanks for sharing it!).

However, the system could not boot, ending up with a blank screen. At this point no external monitor was recognized and no reaction at all so I assumed that the kernel (4.4-4 from testing) died. Finally, I found the solution in the Wiki.

Recompiling the kernel with the modules

intel_agp

and

i915

fixed the problems. To this point I didn't test if both are necessary or not. I'm just glad having a brand new system now on this wonderful hardware, it works like a charm!

Cheers,
eNauz

EDIT: It seems that my hardware only needs the i915 module.

Last edited by eNauz (2016-01-29 09:30:29)

turnip · 2016-01-21 13:33:49

Hi folks,

I bought one of these for this laptop:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B017UI0WMK/r … 71_TE_item

I'm using it with an external monitor just fine. However I can't get the extra USB port to work. When I plug in my keyboard I just see this in dmesg:

[22252.966807] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 12
[22252.966821] usb 1-2.2: USB disconnect, device number 13

I also tried plugging in my phone, which doesn't work either. However I can see that it's providing power to the phone/keyboard.

Any ideas? I've no idea how to debug this. Anyone else had success with a similar setup? I'm on kernel 4.4 final.

Cheers

bart_vv · 2016-01-21 16:12:48

Wasn't sure external displays on 3.1 work at all. You may want to take a look at https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread. … ot-working , there is an interesting finding that it works when it is plugged when powering on.

Are there any other usb 3.1 devices there already? Anybody tested them? What about thunderbolt 3? Is this supported in linux? Seems to be hard to find anything about that on google...

Last edited by bart_vv (2016-01-23 00:18:46)

turnip · 2016-01-22 10:47:58

Thanks. Yes, turns out it does work if plugged in before powering of. Though that kind of removes the point of having one of these hubs in the first place. Oh well, hopefully support will improve.

The external display works fine. I will try a friend's USB-C charger with it and find out if that works.

kgizdov · 2016-01-22 22:49:40

turnip wrote:

Thanks. Yes, turns out it does work if plugged in before powering of. Though that kind of removes the point of having one of these hubs in the first place. Oh well, hopefully support will improve.
The external display works fine. I will try a friend's USB-C charger with it and find out if that works.

That is strange. The Dell hub I got didn't work at first as you mentioned. However, after I rebooted with the hub plugged in, it now works fine every time regardless of the situation. Maybe it has something to do with Dell's BIOS or the hub itself. I also remember that Dell flagged BIOS 1.1.7 the first version to support their hub. So maybe check if your BIOS is up to date or if it has any effect.

halka · 2016-01-25 20:00:07

Hi! First of all, that for all the up-to-date info in the thread and in the wiki page, it's really appreciated.

I'm currently running on kernel from drm-intel-nightly branch without any kernel parameters, and can't seem to run into any issues. I've tried running with "pcie_aspm=force i915.enable_fbc=1 i915.enable_rc6=7 i915.enable_psr=1" and saw some power consumption improvements (about 1W), but I haven't exactly taken care to weed out statistical errors. However, while they helped some with powersaving, they also caused some 1-2 sec. long lockups which kept driving me crazy. Other than that I'm pretty happy, suspend/resume works fine, no issues with sound, no coilwhine.

Also disabled SATA_LINKPWR_ON* settings in tlp as tlp-stat -w reported some ata errors.

One weird thing left is that the Ethernet -> USB-C dongle needs to be plugged in at boot time, otherwise it won't be recognized. Does anyone have any ideas how I could make it work after plugging it into a live system?

My only other worry is that it'll be similar once my HDMI -> USB-C dongle gets here.

e: oh yeah, one other thing. do the media keys work for you? I mean player control ones, like play/pause.

Last edited by halka (2016-01-25 21:05:16)

diraimondo · 2016-01-26 10:21:38

On my XPS 13 9350 (QHD) I'm stuck in getting a reliable suspend/resume support. Closing the lid or invoking 'sudo systemctl suspend' it sometimes suspend (the led on the power button keep the light) but often it switch off and on the supposed resume action it power-up with a common boot (lost session). I saw just few reports about this and I don't understand what is different on my system.
I'm using the kernel 4.4 from testing without any extra option on kernel command-line. Bios 1.1.9 and adaptive contrast disabled before removing Win10 from my system. I've also tried to switch on UXA acceleration for Intel driver.

Should I use kernel 'linux-drm-intel-nightly' from AUR as halka?

EDIT: just built linux-drm-intel-nightly: touchpad doesn't work and after second attempt of suspending, it switched off...

EDIT: I forgot to specify that sometimes, with kernel 4.4, it happens that the touchscreen stops to work too after a suspend/resume.

EDIT: switched on tlp-git and reverted on kernel 4.4 from testing; now the suspend-resume is more reliable but it can happens that touchscreen stops to work.

Last edited by diraimondo (2016-01-26 17:02:11)

freebe · 2016-01-26 13:48:45

So how do you guys even install Arch on this Laptop?
I have the broadcom card installed. And of course the installation media doesn't recognize it, since it doesn't run on the newest kernel. So i have no internet connection and cannot get the "base"and "base-devel" groups. Any suggestions how to solve this? Can I manually upgrade the kernel and the linux-firmware on the installation media (usb-stick)? Or how did you guys do it?

I have the 8GB Laptop with FHD Display and i7-6500U.

ewaller · 2016-01-26 15:26:29

freebe wrote:

So how do you guys even install Arch on this Laptop?... So i have no internet connection and cannot get the "base"and "base-devel" groups. Any suggestions how to solve this?

USB Tether a phone. It will appear as a wired Internet connection. Just run dhcpcd after it is connected.
Note that the phone does not need to be using your carrier (LTE/G3/etc), it can be on a wifi network (*) in which case the phone will provide NAT forwarding for the wifi without impacting any data plan you may have.

(*) Some carriers [T-Mobile] have mods in place in their stock ROMS that force you off of wifi on to carrier data when you try to tether. I have no clue why they do that.

diraimondo · 2016-01-26 17:55:02

Given that my system now always resumes, I observed that sometimes the power led stays on and sometimes goes off during suspend sleep. The correct behavior is to get a led off during the suspend. On my system I'm using a btrfs filesystem and I've just discovered that in kernel 4.4 there is a bug (already patched in next release) that prevent the system to go in real suspend during some cleaning actions of the btrfs filesystem (https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108361). I'm carrying more testing to discover if it is related to my touchscreen stopping (missed deep sleep = touchscreen break?).

As temporary workaround they suggest to make a sync just before to suspend. I will put this in some systemd unit, but a simple 'sync; sudo systemctl suspend' looks reliable.

I hope this can save time to someone.

Last edited by diraimondo (2016-01-26 17:55:33)

freebe · 2016-01-27 17:13:08

ewaller wrote:

freebe wrote:
So how do you guys even install Arch on this Laptop?... So i have no internet connection and cannot get the "base"and "base-devel" groups. Any suggestions how to solve this?
USB Tether a phone. It will appear as a wired Internet connection. Just run dhcpcd after it is connected.
Note that the phone does not need to be using your carrier (LTE/G3/etc), it can be on a wifi network (*) in which case the phone will provide NAT forwarding for the wifi without impacting any data plan you may have.
(*) Some carriers [T-Mobile] have mods in place in their stock ROMS that force you off of wifi on to carrier data when you try to tether. I have no clue why they do that.

Thank you ewaller that worked fine! I had that Idea before, but I didn't know how to make my system recognize the tether. dhcpcd did the trick. Always learning more with Arch

kgizdov · 2016-01-27 19:40:37

Anyone tried 4.5-rc1 yet?

davidgf · 2016-01-28 01:07:23

I'm on 4.5-rc1, so far so good (Im using fedora & rawhided kernel repo, so latest kernel always!)

I cannot get my touchscreen to work after suspend (happens randomly) anyone?

Stitch · 2016-01-28 05:49:23

Hello,

I never had any issues on 4.3. Started having few blank screens after reboots when moved to 4.4. That was fixed by adding intel_agp and i915 to the initramfs image. Otherwise, 4.3 -> 4.4 made no difference.

Only one really annoying issue. There is no front light blinking when it is suspended. So you cannot tell whether the laptop is shut down or suspended when the lid is closed. Really annoying.
Has anyone encountered this? Thanks.

P.S.
I have the latest BIOS (1.1.9)

diraimondo · 2016-01-28 07:29:23

davidgf wrote:

I cannot get my touchscreen to work after suspend (happens randomly) anyone?

I'm on 4.4 kernel patched for "btrfs freeze on susped" bug (see my post above). The last missing problem for me is the touchscreen non working after suspend on closing lid on battery (sometimes it works if I'm on AC). I've tried before/agter suspend to disable/enable the device using xinput and also to remove/reload the modules about touchscreen: no joy. :-(

Stitch wrote:

Only one really annoying issue. There is no front light blinking when it is suspended. So you cannot tell whether the laptop is shut down or suspended when the lid is closed. Really annoying.

It's true, there is no external led that let you know if it is suspended. The internal led on power button (you can still see it if you lift the lid of 1-2 cm) goes off if you shutdown or on a successfully suspend. If on suspend it keeps the light, this means that there was some problem on suspend (it will continue to drain the battery...). In this case you can look at the log to catch the cause. In my case it was a bug of kernel 4.4 that prevents the suspend on some btrfs activities.

Do you suffer of the problem where the laptop shutdowns instead of suspend? I got it (see my posts) but it was solved for me switching on tlp-git.

diraimondo · 2016-01-28 07:34:59

halka wrote:

One weird thing left is that the Ethernet -> USB-C dongle needs to be plugged in at boot time, otherwise it won't be recognized. Does anyone have any ideas how I could make it work after plugging it into a live system?
My only other worry is that it'll be similar once my HDMI -> USB-C dongle get here.

I can confirm that Dell Ethernet-usb-c dongle works only after reboot and that the Dell HDMI-usb-c dongle suffers the same problem. :-(

kgizdov · 2016-01-28 11:47:24

davidgf wrote:

I'm on 4.5-rc1, so far so good (Im using fedora & rawhided kernel repo, so latest kernel always!)
I cannot get my touchscreen to work after suspend (happens randomly) anyone?

How's power usage for you? I saw some NVMe changes are included and some Intel RST stuff - are you able to mount the SSD in PCIe mode or not? Do you still get the ACPI errors or the Intel DRM link speed error?

halka · 2016-01-28 16:40:14

diraimondo wrote:

halka wrote:
One weird thing left is that the Ethernet -> USB-C dongle needs to be plugged in at boot time, otherwise it won't be recognized. Does anyone have any ideas how I could make it work after plugging it into a live system?
My only other worry is that it'll be similar once my HDMI -> USB-C dongle get here.
I can confirm that Dell Ethernet-usb-c dongle works only after reboot and that the Dell HDMI-usb-c dongle suffers the same problem. :-(

I just got the multiport adapter (model designation DA200) with HDMI, D-SUB, Ethernet and USB 3.0 today. Only have a monitor with D-SUB connector on hand, but it was recognized without issues on plugging into a live system (i.e. no reboot necessary). May be a different story with HDMI, will try to test that out soonish. The Ethernet however was still not recognized. A colleague has just told me that that's the same story on his old generation XPS 15 (2013? The one with round corners anyway ), so no news there.

e: so HDMI seems bit hit or miss, connecting a 'native' HDMI monitor worked fine, but one with a DVI -> HDMI converter did not, even on reboot.

Last edited by halka (2016-01-28 16:57:36)

diraimondo · 2016-01-28 17:08:34

halka wrote:

diraimondo wrote:
halka wrote:
One weird thing left is that the Ethernet -> USB-C dongle needs to be plugged in at boot time, otherwise it won't be recognized. Does anyone have any ideas how I could make it work after plugging it into a live system?
My only other worry is that it'll be similar once my HDMI -> USB-C dongle get here.
I can confirm that Dell Ethernet-usb-c dongle works only after reboot and that the Dell HDMI-usb-c dongle suffers the same problem. :-(
I just got the multiport adapter (model designation DA200) with HDMI, D-SUB, Ethernet and USB 3.0 today. Only have a monitor with D-SUB connector on hand, but it was recognized without issues on plugging into a live system (i.e. no reboot necessary). May be a different story with HDMI, will try to test that out soonish. The Ethernet however was still not recognized. A colleague has just told me that that's the same story on his old generation XPS 15 (2013? The one with round corners anyway ), so no news there.

I think this is a different beast: I'm talking of USB-C dongles. But... different beasts, but similar problems.

diraimondo · 2016-01-28 21:40:24

diraimondo wrote:

Do you suffer of the problem where the laptop shutdowns instead of suspend? I got it (see my posts) but it was solved for me switching on tlp-git.

My system started again to shutdown on suspend.... :-(

Stitch · 2016-01-29 01:34:17

diraimondo wrote:

Stitch wrote:
Only one really annoying issue. There is no front light blinking when it is suspended. So you cannot tell whether the laptop is shut down or suspended when the lid is closed. Really annoying.
It's true, there is no external led that let you know if it is suspended. The internal led on power button (you can still see it if you lift the lid of 1-2 cm) goes off if you shutdown or on a successfully suspend. If on suspend it keeps the light, this means that there was some problem on suspend (it will continue to drain the battery...). In this case you can look at the log to catch the cause. In my case it was a bug of kernel 4.4 that prevents the suspend on some btrfs activities.
Do you suffer of the problem where the laptop shutdowns instead of suspend? I got it (see my posts) but it was solved for me switching on tlp-git.

By saying "there is no external led that let you know if it is suspended", do you mean that it is not a Linux specific issue? There is no hardware indicator? My old XPS14 blinks happily so I naturally assumed that all XPS models indicate and this is just some bios/setup issue on Linux?

As for the other issue, no I never had shut-downs instead of suspends. Surprisingly, it's been very smooth for me (touch wood)
Bios is an extremely slow load though. It is as slow as my dell server boot.

EDIT:

Going through your posts I can see some setup differences. They might trigger your unusual behaviour. My touch screen is off in bios (useless on a laptop anyway). I also update Intel microcodes...
I run BTRFS but never had any issues.

Last edited by Stitch (2016-01-29 01:43:00)

diraimondo · 2016-01-29 13:06:34

Stitch wrote:

By saying "there is no external led that let you know if it is suspended", do you mean that it is not a Linux specific issue? There is no hardware indicator?

I guess it is an hardware limitation (in other words, it is the same on Windows) but I'm not fully sure because Windows 10 Pro survived on my system for few hours... :-)
There is a big flat led in front of the laptop but it light up only when the battery is almost empty and, if I remember well, when it is charging. Nothing related to the suspend status.

Going through your posts I can see some setup differences. They might trigger your unusual behaviour. My touch screen is off in bios (useless on a laptop anyway). I also update Intel microcodes...
I run BTRFS but never had any issues.

Disabling the touchscreen could help in these minor glitches. Did you get any battery saving disabling the touchscreen? I'm using it under Gnome so I would keep it (also after a suspend...).

I'm using Intel microcodes updates too: intel-ucode 20150121 from main repository. Are you using the testing version?

My XPS 13 started to resume correctly again after reverting to Xorg backend (yesterday night I was testing Wayland) but only after a full shutdown (it was enough to reboot it many times after the xorg revert... :-\ ).

vilavil · 2016-01-29 16:16:32

BIOS 1.2.3 is out http://www.dell.com/support/home/uk/en/ … egoryId=BI

Still no fix for ACPI errors in dmesg. The only difference in dmesg diff was the following (which could also be attributed to upgrading from 4.4-rc6 kernel to final 4.4) :

[ 1.126065] usb: failed to peer usb2-port4 and usb1-port6 by location (usb2-port4:none) (usb1-port6:usb2-port3)
[ 1.126067] usb usb2-port4: failed to peer to usb1-port6 (-16)
[ 1.126628] usb: failed to peer usb2-port5 and usb1-port6 by location (usb2-port5:none) (usb1-port6:usb2-port3)
[ 1.126629] usb usb2-port5: failed to peer to usb1-port6 (-16)
[ 1.127267] usb: failed to peer usb2-port6 and usb1-port6 by location (usb2-port6:none) (usb1-port6:usb2-port3)
[ 1.127268] usb usb2-port6: failed to peer to usb1-port6 (-16)

zetxx · 2016-01-29 18:58:03

one question, every time when i run powertop i see touchscreen in bad state, i mean that is not in power saving mode, did someone know how to put it in power save mode ?

Arch Linux

#251 2016-01-20 01:20:55

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#252 2016-01-21 09:22:07

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#253 2016-01-21 13:33:49

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#254 2016-01-21 16:12:48

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#255 2016-01-22 10:47:58

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#256 2016-01-22 22:49:40

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#257 2016-01-25 20:00:07

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#258 2016-01-26 10:21:38

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#259 2016-01-26 13:48:45

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#260 2016-01-26 15:26:29

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#261 2016-01-26 17:55:02

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#262 2016-01-27 17:13:08

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#263 2016-01-27 19:40:37

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#264 2016-01-28 01:07:23

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#265 2016-01-28 05:49:23

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#266 2016-01-28 07:29:23

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#267 2016-01-28 07:34:59

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#268 2016-01-28 11:47:24

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#269 2016-01-28 16:40:14

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#270 2016-01-28 17:08:34

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#271 2016-01-28 21:40:24

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#272 2016-01-29 01:34:17

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#273 2016-01-29 13:06:34

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#274 2016-01-29 16:16:32

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

#275 2016-01-29 18:58:03

Re: Dell XPS 13 9350 Late 2015

Board footer