Dell XPS 15 7590

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Note: This page refers to the 7590 revision of the XPS 15. Most of it also applies to the Precision 5540.

Device/Functionality	PCI/USB ID	Status
Suspend		Working
Hibernate		Working
Integrated Graphics	`8086:3e9b`	Working
Discrete Nvidia Graphics	`10de:1f91`	Modify
Backlight		Working
WiFi	`8086:2723`	Working
Bluetooth	`8087:0029`	Working
rfkill		Working
Audio	`8086:a348`	Working
Touchpad		Working
Touchscreen		Working
Webcam	`0c45:6723`	Working
Card Reader	`10ec:525a`	Working
Function/Multimedia Keys		Working
Power Management		Working
EFI firmware updates		Working
Fingerprint reader	`27c6:5395`	Not working
Thunderbolt	`8086:15da`	Working

This page contains recommendations for running Arch Linux on the Dell XPS 15 7590 (2019).

Pre-Installation UEFI Settings

Before installing it is necessary to modify some UEFI Settings. They can be accessed by pressing the F2 key repeatedly when booting.

Warning: If you will be dual booting alongside an existing Windows installation, Windows will not boot if you just go ahead and make the switch to AHCI as described in the steps below. You must log into you Windows install both before and after that BIOS change to set and then remove a safeboot flag, respectively.

Under 'System Configuration', change the SATA Mode from the default "RAID" to "AHCI". This will allow Linux to detect the NVME SSD.
Under 'Secure Boot', disable secure boot to allow Linux to boot.
Under 'POST Behaviour', change "Fastboot" to "Thorough". This prevents intermittent boot failures.

If you are using multiboot with an existing Windows installation, make sure that "fast startup" is disabled in Windows 8/10.

Power Management

Suspend

By default, the very inefficient s2idle suspend variant is incorrectly selected. This is probably due to the BIOS. The much more efficient deep variant should be selected instead:

 $ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep 
 [s2idle] deep
 # echo deep | tee /sys/power/mem_sleep
 $ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep 
 s2idle [deep]

To make the change permanent add mem_sleep_default=deep to your kernel parameters.

An easy way would be to add mem_sleep_default=deep to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry in /etc/default/grub:

 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mem_sleep_default=deep"

Read more regarding the sleep variants on the kernel documentation [1].

Warning: Some users have reported a problem where the CPUs get stuck in a high power state after resuming from S3 (deep) suspension [2].

Hibernate

Powertop

Discrete Graphics

Starting with the 460 series of the Nvidia drivers, optional advanced power management options can be enabled. See: [3]

After having set the configuration according to the Nvidia documentation, correct operation can be checked using nvidia-smi from nvidia-utils: nvidia-smi -q -d PERFORMANCE

When idle, the following state should be reported:

 ==============NVSMI LOG==============
 
 Timestamp                                 : Sun Apr 11 14:19:40 2021
 Driver Version                            : 465.19.01
 CUDA Version                              : 11.3
 
 Attached GPUs                             : 1
 GPU 00000000:01:00.0
     Performance State                     : P8
     Clocks Throttle Reasons
         Idle                              : Active
         Applications Clocks Setting       : Not Active
         SW Power Cap                      : Not Active
         HW Slowdown                       : Not Active
             HW Thermal Slowdown           : Not Active
             HW Power Brake Slowdown       : Not Active
         Sync Boost                        : Not Active
         SW Thermal Slowdown               : Not Active
         Display Clock Setting             : Not Active

Reported power consumption in this state should be around 1W.

If you do not plan to use the discrete GPU at all, it can be completely disabled and powered off. See: Hybrid graphics#Fully power down discrete GPU

Warning: Do not disable the discrete GPU before X11 starts, otherwise, it will crash.

Thermal Management

Default thermal management is not very optimized (this is my experience with the i9 processor at least).

The laptop gets hot quite often and the fans run at high speed most of the time.

One solution I found is to use powertop to get a quieter system.

See Powertop for details.

You may activate manual fans control with i8kutils. Install i8kutils^AUR and dell-bios-fan-control-git^AUR. Edit /etc/i8kutils/i8kmon.conf and enable services:

Do a complete daemon-reload, then

# modprobe dell-smm-hwmon
# modprobe i8k

Then one can start/enable i8kmon.service and dell-bios-fan-control.service.

You may have to modify the modprobe options for dell-smm-hwmon to have the above work. See more at this reddit thread

options dell-smm-hwmon ignore_dmi=1

Another solution to decrease CPU temperature by 8°C (as for i7) on average is to

# echo 1 | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo

This is likely to be reset though during adapter plugging and uplugging.

Graphics

Intel modesetting issues

As of early May 2021, the new kernel versions under 5.12.x are causing issues on the Precision 5540 variant of this model where the internal display goes black even before entering the tty.

The issue has been identified, but a fix is yet to be mainlined.

NVIDIA Optimus

See NVIDIA Optimus.

Backlight

As of Linux kernel 5.12, the OLED backlight is fully supported and works in X11 and Wayland.

For earlier kernel versions, see Backlight#Color correction.

Backlight function keys

When using a LCD display device and in a desktop environment (KDE verified) the function key will be working out of the box for the DEs that have their own key mapping. However, when in a window manager with modesetting driver (and also int the tty console), the backlight controlling function keys will not be working and will throw out errors like ACPI BIOS Error, could not resolve symbol.

Usually /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight is symlinked to /sys/device/pci00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card0/card0-eDP-1/, and by changing the value of backlight file inside the directory the backlight level can be controlled, but the operation needs root privilege. Establishing a udev rule and accordingly a backlight control group will help, but these steps can be done easily with the package light.

Then a mapping of function key to the command, say, light -A 3 and light -U 3 would be in need. XF86BrightnessDown and XF86BrightnessUp will not be working. The mapping of the keys can be done with acpid. Install the package, then insert these lines to the case "$1" in block

/etc/acpi/handler.sh

video/brightnessup) light -A 3 ;;
video/brightnessdown) light -U 3 ;;

Start/enable acpid.service.

Networking

WiFi

With kernel version 5.2.2 and linux-firmware 20190717.bf13a71-1, WiFi would be working out of the box.

Firmware Update

Fwupd

Dell provides firmware updates directly via LVFS and can thus be flashed directly from Linux. See fwupd.

Manual installation

Firmware images can be found at Dell support page. Keeping an existing Windows system will make updates of BIOS much simpler. If a clean Arch Linux install is the case in order to install:

Download the desired firmware from section "Dell XPS 15 7590 System BIOS"
Save it in /efi/EFI/Dell/Bios/ or /boot/EFI/Dell/Bios/ (this path may vary, depending on your installation)
Reboot the system, and enter the boot menu by pressing repeatedly F12 on Dell logo
Choose "Bios Flash Update"
Select the file previously saved, and start the process

The process will take about five minutes, during which the system will have some reboots and push fans at maximum speed. Finally the system will reboot normally.

Fingerprint reader

It is a Goodix fingerprint reader.

The producer does not provide any Linux driver nor documentation to implement one.

Some effort is in slow progress to reverse engineer the windows drivers (see [4]).