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Can't control brightness of MacBook Pro 6,2 LCD screen
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Splooshie123
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Joined: 16 Apr 2012
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 10:43 am    Post subject: Can't control brightness of MacBook Pro 6,2 LCD screen Reply with quote

Hi.

When I was using Ubuntu, I installed pommed to control the LCD brightness and keyboard backlight and eject key, etc.
In Gentoo, I discovered the ebuild for pommed is horribly outdated so I built pommed from source.

Pommed can successfully change my keyboard backlight and I was able to reverse the function key with it also.
However, I am still unable to change the brightness of the screen.

This is not a problem with pommed. I emerged nvclock and it is also unable to change the brightness.
After that, I emerged macbook-backlight and it is also useless:
Code:
macbook-backlight -s 100
error, cannot find video card

I know that all three programs access some files in /sys (or was it proc?) to change the brightness but the files don't exist. There is nothing related to the lcd backlight in /sys. The only thing I could find was "kbd_backlight" which is for the keyboard backlight. Any ideas why the relevant files are missing?

According to lspci, I have 2 GPUs: intel HD and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M.
I am using the nouveau driver.
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avx
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Joined: 21 Jun 2004
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you have FB_NVIDIA_BACKLIGHT set in your kernel?
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Splooshie123
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Joined: 16 Apr 2012
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 3:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

FB_NVIDIA_BACKLIGHT is not listed in my .config at all.

grep BACKLIGHT /usr/src/linux/.config
Code:
CONFIG_FB_BACKLIGHT=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_LCD_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE=y
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_GENERIC=y
# CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_PROGEAR is not set
CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_APPLE=y
# CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_SAHARA is not set
# CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_ADP8860 is not set
# CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_ADP8870 is not set
# CONFIG_LEDS_TRIGGER_BACKLIGHT is not set
CONFIG_DRM_NOUVEAU_BACKLIGHT=y


EDIT: I just took a look at the config for Ubuntu (pommed worked there before) and discovered it had several more BACKLIGHT options, including CONFIG_FB_NVIDIA_BACKLIGHT.
Additionally, I discovered that CONFIG_FB_NVIDIA_BACKLIGHT is hidden in "make menuconfig" unless nvidia framebuffer support is activated.
I'm recompiling the kernel as I speak..........type, I'm recompiling the kernel as I type.
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Splooshie123
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2012 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Setting CONFIG_FB_NVIDIA_BACKLIGHT didn't help. Or is there something else I need to do?
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Splooshie123
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 06, 2012 11:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry to necro my own thread, but I finally found a solution 7 months later.

The backlight can be changed by echoing a brightness value to the Apple GMUX backlight driver.

Code:
echo 10000 > /sys/class/backlight/gmux_backlight/brightness


Pommed doesn't support this particular driver, but it was trivial to add that support.

I will post the modification later since I'm not on my gentoo box right now.
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Splooshie123
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2012 9:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here it is.

Put this file in /path/to/pommed-1.39-source-code/pommed, name it sysfs_backlight.c (replace the original), and compile:

http://pastebin.com/q7pL7xQh
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