Dell XPS 15 (9510)

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Reason: Misses an Accessibility section (Discuss in Talk:Dell XPS 15 (9510))
Hardware PCI/USB ID Working?
Touchpad 04f3:311c Yes
Touch screen 04f3:29e2 Yes
Keyboard Yes
GPU (Intel) 8086:9a60 Yes
GPU (NVIDIA) 10de:25a0 Yes
Webcam 0c45:672e Yes
Bluetooth 8087:0026 Yes
SD Card reader 10ec:5260 Yes
Audio 8086:43c8 Partial
Wireless 8086:43f0 Yes
Fingerprint reader 27c6:63ac Yes
TPM Yes

Installation

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

  • Change the SATA Mode from the default "RAID" to "AHCI". This will allow Linux to detect the NVMe SSD. If dual booting with an existing Windows installation, Windows will not boot after the change but this can be fixed without a re-installation.
  • Change Fastboot to "Thorough" in "POST Behaviour". This prevents intermittent boot failures.
  • Disable Secure Boot to allow Linux to boot. Alternatively, you can choose to set up Secure Boot so that it works with Linux and you can take advantage of its potential security benefits.

Installation of Arch Linux can proceed normally. Refer to the Installation guide for more information.

Note: Many Dell XPS UEFI do not support passing kernel line options directly to the kernel and will result in a frozen boot. Use a bootloader or Arch-EFIBoot[1] instead.

Firmware

They are 2 ways to update the UEFI firmware:

  • through a running Linux session with fwupd,
  • through UEFI.

UEFI

Firmware images can be found at Dell support page as XPS9510_Precision5560_X.Y.Z.exe files. In order to install:

  • Download the desired firmware from section "Dell XPS 15 9570 System BIOS"
  • Save it in /boot/, /boot/EFI/ 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.

Function keys

Key Visible?1 Marked?2 Effect
Fn+Esc No Yes Enables Fn lock
Fn+F1 Yes Yes XF86AudioMute
Fn+F2 Yes Yes XF86AudioLowerVolume
Fn+F3 Yes Yes XF86AudioRaiseVolume
Fn+F4 Yes Yes XF86AudioPlay
Fn+F5 No Yes Change keyboard backlight
Fn+F6 Yes Yes XF86MonBrightnessDown
Fn+F7 Yes Yes XF86MonBrightnessUp
Fn+F8 Yes Yes Inputs Super+p
Fn+F9 No No
Fn+F10 Yes Yes PrintScreen
Fn+F11 Yes Yes Home
Fn+F12 Yes Yes End
Fn+RCtrl Yes Yes Menu
Fn+Up Yes Yes PageUp
Fn+Down Yes Yes PageDown
Fn+Left Yes No Home
Fn+Right Yes No End
  1. The key is visible to xev and similar tools
  2. The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function

Power Management

Suspend and hibernate

See Power management/Suspend and hibernate.

Only the s2idle suspend variant is supported.

Kernels between 5.17 and 5.18.3 (included) can not suspend properly when Bluetooth is enabled. See this defect for more information.

Powertop

powertop is very efficient to manage power consumption. Run powertop --auto-tune and compare the Watt consumption variation (laptop must be unplugged and running on battery).

This command can be run at every boot: see Powertop#Apply settings.

Fan and temperature monitoring and control

Many of the thermometers can be read with lm_sensors.

The built in fan modes can also be controlled directly by editing the setting in the bios. The libsmbios package provides many tools for reading and modifying certain settings on the computer. The smbios-thermal-ctl command can be used with the --set-thermal-mode flag to change the fan between modes performance, cool-bottom, quiet and balanced. For example: 

# smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode quiet

this changes the fan mode to quiet, which makes the fan curve less aggressive.

The thermometer on the discrete Nvidia GPU can be monitored with the nvidia-smi utility, which is part of nvidia-utils.

Thermal management

Throttling can be an issue under sustained load, install thermald to better manage thermals and avoid reaching temperature where heavy throttling is required.

Graphics

NVIDIA Optimus

See NVIDIA Optimus#Available methods: PRIME render offload works.

In addition, the Ampere generation GPU (GeForce RTX 3050) doesn't need any change for powering off when not used.

Thermal management

Since the 530.41 driver version, nvidia-powerd.service should be used for proper TDP and DynamicBoost control, see NVIDIA Optimus#Low power usage (TDP).

Fingerprint reader

The fingerprint reader is supported by the goodixmoc driver from fprint.

Touchpad lag

The touchpad can be laggy at times, see libinput issues 636 618 for more information.

Update the touchpad firmware to version 0c as described in this comment of issue 618.

microphone not working from jack

External microphone not working from the audio combo jack, see issues 1435421 and thread 1777240 for more information.

It is possible to use the microphone from webcam or an usb microphone

See also