Ubuntu 11.10 64 on Samsung R540

[linux-man]

I just registered to tell my experience with the voria tools (thanks a lot for your work).
I've been using samsung-backlight on 11.04 with success. When I upgraded to oneiric I had a hard time to make it work, particularly the brightness keys (FN up/down). As I've been aware, R540 is not in the compatibility list, so here's what I did to make it work:

1-Blacklisted intel_ips in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (not related to voria)

2-Commented "blacklist samsung-laptop" in /etc/modprobe.d/samsung-backlight.conf. I don't know why, but this way I could modprobe samsung-backlight.

3-Added "acpi_sleep=nonvs acpi_backlight=vendor pcie_aspm=force" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.

4-Installed fglrx-updates so I can use Gnome 3 (I have a Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series).

I upgraded to 3.0.0.13 generic kernel and everything is working.
Now my Samsung is 100% functional.

So, until next bug.

[Kweck]

Hi,

I'm looking for a solution to fix the backlight issue for my R540 for some time now.
I can't get it to work. Even with your descibtion above.

I installed the samsung-tools package and followed your description.
When I try to modprobe samsung-backlight I get "no such device". Same with samsung-laptop.

I also did the update to the 3.0.0.13 kernel.


Any suggestions? Everything is working fine (volume, Battery, Touchpad...) - and did before - but the backlight.

[linux-man]

Did you install samsung-backlight too? I'm using the 'old' samsung-tools v. 1.5. Did you do an update-grub?

[Kweck]

Thank you for your quick reply.

Sorry, that's what I meant. I installed the samsung-backlight package.
I also did the grub update and just checked if the change has taken place in the grub menu.
Currently I booted the 2.0.12 kernel out of the voria ppa without any luck.

I think my main problem is, that modprobe sumsung-backlight is still saying "no such device".

I'm using Unity, not Gnome3.

The Hardware dialogue (additional drivers) is showing the Samsung Backlight driver as activated but not in use.
Beside that the ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX-driver is still in use.

[linux-man]

Trying to understand the differences. Tell me if you want to compare any other configuration

My Samsung is a R540-JT02PT running Ubuntu 11.10 64 bits. Unity and gnome-shell installed.

lspci:

Code: Select all

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller
3f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)
3f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)
3f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
3f:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)

fglrx version 2:8.902-0ubuntu0.1 installed on Synaptic (Additional Drivers usually fail installing fglrx-updates)

From ppa:voria/ppa I'm using: easy-slow-down-manager, load-acpicpufreq-atboot, samsung-backlight, samsung-tools. I still have voria kernel 3.0.0.12 installed, but I'm using 30.0.0.13.

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

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# This file lists those modules which we don't want to be loaded by
# alias expansion, usually so some other driver will be loaded for the
# device instead.

# evbug is a debug tool that should be loaded explicitly
blacklist evbug

# these drivers are very simple, the HID drivers are usually preferred
blacklist usbmouse
blacklist usbkbd

# replaced by e100
blacklist eepro100

# replaced by tulip
blacklist de4x5

# causes no end of confusion by creating unexpected network interfaces
blacklist eth1394

# snd_intel8x0m can interfere with snd_intel8x0, doesn't seem to support much
# hardware on its own (Ubuntu bug #2011, #6810)
blacklist snd_intel8x0m

# Conflicts with dvb driver (which is better for handling this device)
blacklist snd_aw2

# causes failure to suspend on HP compaq nc6000 (Ubuntu: #10306)
blacklist i2c_i801

# replaced by p54pci
blacklist prism54

# replaced by b43 and ssb.
blacklist bcm43xx

# most apps now use garmin usb driver directly (Ubuntu: #114565)
blacklist garmin_gps

# replaced by asus-laptop (Ubuntu: #184721)
blacklist asus_acpi

# low-quality, just noise when being used for sound playback, causes
# hangs at desktop session start (Ubuntu: #246969)
blacklist snd_pcsp

# ugly and loud noise, getting on everyone's nerves; this should be done by a
# nice pulseaudio bing (Ubuntu: #77010)
blacklist pcspkr

# EDAC driver for amd76x clashes with the agp driver preventing the aperture
# from being initialised (Ubuntu: #297750). Blacklist so that the driver
# continues to build and is installable for the few cases where its
# really needed.
blacklist amd76x_edac

blacklist intel_ips

/etc/modprobe.d/samsung-backlight.conf

Code: Select all

#blacklist samsung-laptop
options samsung-backlight use_sabi=1 levels=8 force=1

[Kweck]

Oh, great. I'll get right to it and check the differences.

Stay tuned...

[Kweck]

Ok, got it.

So - first my setup:
I owe a R540 JS0ADE running Ubuntu 11.10 64bit
fglrx 2:8.881 and the same packages and kernel installed.

The blacklist.conf is exactly the same. I did not check the lspci in detail.

Only the samsung-backlight.conf differs in one point.
I had a 0 in use_sabi
I changed it to 1 and it works. I have no idea why it was set to 0

So many thanks. Without your detailed information I never would have been able to get it to work.

[linux-man]

I'm glad I could help

Just to conclude (for now) my adventure, I must confess I had a final problem. Since I prefer Gnome3 over Unity, I found that the combination fglrx+Gnome3 is extremely unstable, even with the latest 11.11 driver, so I returned to the open source radeon driver which is much better in so many ways. And surprise! Brightness keys are still working with no changes in configuration. I never got it to work before. Maybe it's because I installed Jupiter. I really don't care until next installation. The only thing I miss is the HDMI Audio output... but that's another story.

[Kweck]

The HDMI Output does not work?
Over here it's working fine, but I have to set the output device in the audio settings to HDMI.
That worked out of the box.

[linux-man]

It works, but only with fglrx drivers. It seems that 3.0 kernel are able to output HDMI from radeon if activated with one more parameter (radeon.audio=1) but I can't make it work. That and the flicker bug are the last challenges.

[linux-man]

Another update:
Since I couldn't make HDMI sound work with radeon, I returned to fglrx and installed 11.11 driver. Using Gnome 3 is not so bad if I do
sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-u32=DDX,EnableTearFreeDesktop,1
sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-str=DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE
sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-str=DDX,ForceXAA,TRUE
sudo aticonfig --sync-video=on

Let's see about stability over time.