Lenovo Ideapad Y510 is Go (Continued / NEW)

[chrismulderza]

Good News Everyone!

I have a correctly working backlight on my Ideapad Y510! ...

This has been achieved by using a custom DSDT, and nothing else, no fiddling with ACPI or HAL or anything like that.

After days of trawling and scrolling through the original DSDT I finally figured out that the Lenovo emedded controller seems to be expecting some specific input values, and that there seemed to be a slight mistake in the "Package" of values returned by the _BCL AML method. Additionally ACPI as bundled with Ubuntu and the Kernel at the moment, expects the values to be in the correct order, i.e. <value when on AC>, <value when on Battery>, val0, val1, val2 ...etc the most important thing to note is that ACPI at the moment does not appear to sort the values, and assumes that they are from lowest to highest. In the case of the Ideapad they seem to have been reversed.

I have attached the DSDT.dsl in BZIP2 format to this post for those who want to give this a go.

You will obviously need the Intel ASL compiler:

sudo apt-get install iasl

To compile the DSDT just run:

iasl DSDT.dsl

Once it's compiled put it into the initramfs-tools directory under /etc:

sudo cp DSDT.aml /etc/initramfs-tools/

You might need to install the initramfs-tools package

sudo apt-get install initramfs-tools

and then finally regenerate the initrd image

sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r`

reboot the machine and then give it a go...

Please test this and let me know if anyone is experiencing any other difficulties...

Cheers all!

[winnibob]

Good News Everyone!

I have a correctly working backlight on my Ideapad Y510! ...

Thanks a lot! This is awesome!!!
To me, it was the only thing that didn't work perfectly under Ubuntu, and now it does!

I tried it, it took me 2 minutes (with restarting!) and now it's perfect.

[chrismulderza]

Thanks a lot! This is awesome!!!
To me, it was the only thing that didn't work perfectly under Ubuntu, and now it does!

I tried it, it took me 2 minutes (with restarting!) and now it's perfect.

You're welcome winnibob!

Just a note to the other users that may be of interest:

The DSDT.dsl will work with BIOS versions 06CN29W, 06CN30W and 06CN31W, as there was no change in the original DSDT that shipped with these BIOS versions.

Have fun!

Cheers all!

[HunterThomson]

chrismulderza

YOU ARE THE MAN !!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!

I gave you two stars. One for the hard work and one for the Success.


Dude I knew it had to be the DSDT Thank you so much for taking that baton the rest of the way.

Have you sent it off to Lenovo So they can include it in the next BIOS update. Hell they should release a update right now, just for this fix. This is a huge big deal. That back light stuff really really got on my nerves. How can I tell people Linux is so good and my back light doesn't even work right.

You also need to start a thread on the Lenovo forums too.


This is just so alsom I can't even .... wow. THANK YOU.


P.S. Sents you are so good with this stuff now have you thought about working on a DSDT for the Y710. They are having a lot of problems and they all sound like a clear cut case of a bad DSDT.

[talktorishav]

A simple solution I found if the brightness is reversed.
http://techspalace.blogspot.com/2008...-reversed.html

[chrismulderza]

@HunterThomson

Thanks for the kudo's mate. Truth be told, the backlight was getting on my nerves too!

I'll post this onto the Lenovo forums in the new year, I'm off on holiday today, and will only be back the 5th of Jan 2009 Woohoo! ...

I think it's been a collaborative effort on this stuff from everyone, even just the folks giving us some feedback on quirks in this thread

I'll be happy to look at the DSDT for the Y710 as well, not that I have access to one, but if it uses the same mobo I'm sure we can try and find some solution. So any Y710 users out there, please post the following to this thread:

The running generic DSDT

sudo cat /proc/acpi/dsdt > DSDT.bin

The output of lspci

sudo lspci -vvnn > lspci.txt

and the output of dmidecode

sudo dmidecode > dmidecode.txt

I suspect that they might be using the same mobo's but if not, then these bits will help me to "hack" some solution...

My next challenge is to get the sound system working 100%. It does not seem too difficult, and at least I have gotten my hands on the Intel HDA spec, and the Realtek ALC888 codec spec, and some developer info from the ALSA site.

I have broken it down into the following requirements:

1 - 5.1 Surround (6 Channel Mode) should work (i.e Front, Rear, Center, LFE) when using built in speakers

2 - Speakers to be muted when plugging in headphones and switch to 2 Channel Mode)

3 - Should detect presence of a SPDIF connection in the headphone jack

4 - When using SPDIF, 8 Channel mode to be activated (i.e. Front, Rear, Center, LFE, Side)

5 - Switch capture source from internal mic to ecternal mic when jack detected in microphone input.

6 - (Optional) and if possible, ability to toggle headphone jack between headphone and line-out. (According to the ALC888 codec spec this should be possible, so that when connecting the Ideapad to a Hi-Fi Stereo system we don't introduce distortion on the output.)

7 - (Optional) and if possible, ability to toggle microphone in jack to produce output for "Rear line-out" (Should also be possible according to the ALC888 codec spec)


So this sounds ambitious, but I believe things should work correctly, 100% correctly at that. ...

To everyone who has made some superb contributions to this thread, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!..

Cheers all!

[HunterThomson]

Owe Ya, this whole thread and everyone here is awesome. And I get the feeling that there are a whole lot of people that read this thread and don't post. 12,000 hits so far and it has not been up all that long few months. We should start our own web site.... na, Ubuntu is the place.

Chargersfan420 was telling me about it and posted his DSDT.aml on page 8.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=870681&page=8

You know learning how to code AML is really cool. Your getting into some really low level stuff. It would be cool to learn how to code firmware for like routers and wifi cards and stuff.

Mary Christmas and a Happy New year everyone

[wyth]

chrismulderza, yes that does sound ambitious, and I can't wait to see the results. The backlight seems to be working perfectly, even after the latest kernel update. (I re-enabled the proposed repository, to see if some Network Manager issues have been resolved, and I got a kernel update out of it.)

What you're saying about ALSA, at least on my rig, pretty much all works whenever I recompile it. I can' speak to the SPDIF or other optional issues you brought up -- just never had the opportunity. What I'm curious about is if there are new hardware configurations being shipped with this machine (at least the Y510) that changes the scenario somewhat. I know new video cards are being shipped, and I don't know if any other new components are out there. But that could change someone's needed configuration to get sound fully working.

I don't know if this is possible, and I really rather doubt it, but I wonder if there is some sort of way to compile ALSA once and make that "sticky" through the kernel upgrades, so I wouldn't have to recompile ever couple of weeks. It's fine for me, but for others who are getting used to this stuff, it may be more pleasant to show them how they need to do something once to fix it, rather than having to fix it time and again, which gives it the sense of being perpetually broken.

Also looking forward to the post on pulseaudio. On my desktop I have no issues with it, except for I sometimes need to give it a kick in the pants after coming out of suspend. I just haven't had time to work with it, so I'm not sure of it's uses at this point, aside from getting in the way of sound on my laptop.

(By the way, since ALSA is in the repositories, why can't it just work out of the box? The current version in the repository is later than what was being downloaded and compiled by some of us last year, yet the extra features that make the sound worthwhile just don't work unless you download the same software and compile it yourself. I'm just curious why that might be, and if there's a way around it.)

[wyth]

By the way, I know they've been talking about the screen brightness, etc. at the Lenovo thread for Ubuntu here, and I'm sure they'd love to see what you (chrismulderza) have done.

[lun]

Where do you put the dsdt.dsl?

nick@schwieterman:~$ iasl DSDT.dsl

Intel ACPI Component Architecture
ASL Optimizing Compiler version 20061109 [May 16 2007]
Copyright (C) 2000 - 2006 Intel Corporation
Supports ACPI Specification Revision 3.0a

Error    4067 - Could not open file "DSDT.dsl" (No such file or directory)

I have it on my desktop now.