Dell XPS 17 (9710)
| Hardware | PCI/USB ID | Working? |
|---|---|---|
| Video | Yes | |
| Wireless | Yes | |
| Bluetooth | Yes | |
| Audio | Yes | |
| Touchpad | Partial | |
| Webcam | Yes | |
| Infrared Camera Authentication | Partial | |
| USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 | Yes | |
| Fingerprint sensor | Yes | |
| S3 Sleep | Partial | |
| Hibernation | Yes |
UEFI
Before installing it is necessary to modify some UEFI Settings. They can be accessed by pressing the F12 key repeatedly when booting.
- Change the SATA Mode from the default "RAID" to "AHCI". This will allow Linux to detect the NVME SSD.
- Disable secure boot to allow Linux to boot. This may be re-enabled at a later point. See Using a signed bootloader
Dual boot
Please note that changing from "RAID" to "AHCI" can break the default Windows installation and require a complete reinstall. Usually running windows own startup repair utility however fixes this issue in most cases. Another alternative is to follow this guide.
The reinstall can be done through the Dell recovery in the BIOS if needed.
Once you used the startup repair utility or have reinstalled, Windows should boot normally in AHCI mode and without error. Then one can proceed with typical dual boot setup.
GPU
The GPU does not work properly with bbswitch, make sure to uninstall bbswitch and install only primus and bumblebee to start GPU driven applications with optirun or primusrun.
Firmware
fwupd supports this device.
Thunderbolt
The following thunderbolt devices have been tested:
| Device | Status | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Dell WD19TBS 180W | Working | - |
Audio
In the current kernel audio is still broken, it will be fixed however in 5.15. To fix the issue see custom kernel with xps fixes.
Touchpad sluggish/sticky
Some users find the touchpad are sluggish or sticky occasionally. There is a tracking bug https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/618 but it is not root-caused yet.
Keyboard and Touchpad unresponsive issues on wayland
The keyboard and touchpad do work usually, but if you are running wayland you may get a completely non working touchpad + keyboard. This is an issue with a signal ment to signalize the switch to tablet mode for convertible or 2in1 laptops. A fix will land in kernel soon, see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/662. For fixing this issue see custom kernel with xps fixes.
Custom kernel with XPS fixes
To fix all issues with known fixes you currently will need to compile your own kernel. Install https://github.com/wzrdtales/linux-arch-compile
Wireless
The wireless card seems to be rather weak compared to other laptops, we noticed that using the laptop while the lid is closed impacts the wifi signal (5GHz) negatively by about 36%.
Fan control
The dell-smm-hwmon currently does not work, since it does not have any access to the fans and cannot read or write to them. The bios has to regulate and take care. However fans are very silent usually.
BIOS Thermal Modes / Fan profiles
Currently the only choice are the BIOS controlled fans, which means you have to control the bios thermal parameters. This is done within a terminal with the libsmbios package, or alternatively via plasma5-applets-plasma-pstateAUR:
To find out what thermal mode is set type:
# smbios-thermal-ctl -g
To find all available thermal modes type:
# smbios-thermal-ctl -i
And finally to set the desired thermal mode that you identified with the command before type:
# smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=THERMAL_MODE
- "Quiet" and "Cool Bottom" profiles limit CPU power and thus reduces overall system performance.
- "Balanced" and "Performance" profiles remove this limit.
Performance throttling
There is a problem with performance throttling currently. Which can be fixed by executing the following:
# rmmod intel_rapl_msr # rmmod processor_thermal_device_pci_legacy # rmmod processor_thermal_device # rmmod processor_thermal_rapl # rmmod intel_rapl_common # rmmod intel_powerclamp # modprobe intel_powerclamp # modprobe intel_rapl_common # modprobe processor_thermal_rapl # modprobe processor_thermal_device # modprobe intel_rapl_msr
The underlying issue is yet unknown and has to be tracked down.
Hardware acceleration
The dell ships with Gen12 Intel CPUs. Those only work with intel-media-driver. Firefox tabs will crash currently, which is related to the following bug.
There is no real fix but to disable the sandbox, which can be done via about:config by setting security.sandbox.content.level to 0. This however is an impact security wise, so the recommendation is to wait for the bug to be fixed and disable the hardware acceleration instead.