Backlight and suspend not working on Dell 5190, Debian 13 (Linux 6.12 LTS)

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Hello everyone, I’m new here :waving_hand:

I have a Chromebook Dell 5190 and for the last two years it has been running Debian 12 without problems. I’ve upgraded to Debian 13 recently and I had regressions:

  • the backlight is 100% or 0%, can’t be set to something in between
  • can’t wake up from suspend, it’s just a blackscreen, forced to hard reboot
  • the “power led” (the one that is white when the pc is up, and blinking when suspended) is always off

The kernel coming with Debian 13 is 6.12 LTS so I tried to boot on the old 6.1 that was still there and all the issues disappeared, so it’s something that changed in the kernel.

After some research it seems that backlight was reworked in 6.2 so it may be a cause, I tried all the “acpi_backlight” parameters (video, linux, vendor…) and it did not solve the problem.

Do you have some ideas? Is it that the hardware is so specific no one maintaining the kernel has it and so my chromebook is not supported anymore?

Thank you

2

nothing about the GPU hardware in your device is unique or special, it’s the same integrated Intel GPU in millions of other devices.

the only things that affect backlight control are the firmware (ACPI) and the kernel drivers.

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