Fixing nvidia backlight in 2015: on Linux 3.13
22 September 2015
I’m running Linux Mint 17.1 with Linux 3.13.0. I recently upgraded my nvidia driver to nvidia-346, and my backlight control broke (again!). We’ve been on the backlight merry-go-round for far too long.
Anyway, here’s a fix that might help. There’s a new kernel flag you can add to
your grub file called video.use_native_backlight
.
Let’s get started: open your grub config file at
/etc/default/grub
And append the video.use_native_backlight parameter to your boot options:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video.use_native_backlight=1"
Now update your grub installation by running update-grub
as superuser.
My boot parameters used to include the classic acpi_backlight=vendor
, but it
looks like the nvidia-346 driver doesn’t handle that option as the older drivers
did. Hopefully this will help you! (For reference, I’m on a ThinkPad T420)
Thanks to https://jamielinux.com/blog/cannot-adjust-screen-brightness-on-fedora/ for the tip. I’m mainly reposting this so it will include the words “Linux Mint” and “T420” for wayward backlight-deprived souls.