Is there any way to make brightness work on a HP ENVY 15-dr0350nd?
Emily Wong 
Since a few days, I got a HP ENVY 15-dr0350nd. It has a gorgeous 4k screen and NVIDIA® GeForce® MX250 video. Pretty much everything works well, apart from the fact that so far, I did not find any way to set brightness, except with xrandr. It works neither from keys (although it shows the changing slider), nor from energy settings.
I'd love to see that this is a dupe of an existing question, however, despite the fact that I tried I believe all options that were mentioned inside and outside AU:
- running both nouveau and nvidia drivers
- running the very latest 430 nvidia driver
- running the latest 5.2 kernel
- adding the boot parameters
acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=intel,acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=intel_backlight,acpi_backlight=vendor,acpi_backlight=video, which were mentioned in several posts and/or blogs. - tried controlling brightness with
xbacklightandddcontrol - edited the file
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf - tried
sudo echo <number> > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness, which did make the slider in energy settings move, but not the real brightness.
So far nothing gave a sign of live to setting brightness on this otherwise gorgeous laptop. If nothing else is possible, I'll control brightness with xrandr, but would love to see it work the way it should.
Did anyone find a fix or workaround?
72 Answers
Update June 16, 2019 2:44pm MST
It was revealed it's a "WLED" screen not an "OLED" screen we are interested in. Hope can be found in this Linux Kernel Proposed Update message:
qcom: spmi-wled: Support for QCOM wled driver
From: Kiran Gunda
To: bjorn.andersson-AT-linaro.org, linux-arm-msm-AT-vger.kernel.org
Subject: [PATCH V1 0/4] qcom: spmi-wled: Support for QCOM wled driver
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 17:48:33 +0530
Message-ID: <>
Cc: linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-msm-owner-AT-vger.kernel.org, Kiran Gunda
Archive-link: Article
WLED driver provides the interface to the display driver to adjust the brightness of the display backlight. This driver exposes two APIs to set and get the brightness of the display backlight through the backlight framework. This driver has the support to handle the OVP (over voltage protection) and the SC (short circuit protection) interrupts. It also has the auto calibration algorithm support to configure the right strings if the user specified string configuration is in-correct.
Kiran Gunda (4): qcom: spmi-wled: Add support for qcom wled driver qcom: spmi-wled: Add support for short circuit handling qcom: spmi-wled: Add support for OVP interrupt handling qcom: spmi-wled: Add auto-calibration logic support .../bindings/leds/backlight/qcom-spmi-wled.txt | 118 +++ drivers/video/backlight/Kconfig | 9 + drivers/video/backlight/Makefile | 1 + drivers/video/backlight/qcom-spmi-wled.c | 999 +++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 1127 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/leds/backlight/qcom-spmi-wled.txt create mode 100644 drivers/video/backlight/qcom-spmi-wled.c-- The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of the Code Aurora Forum, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
Original Answer
Although not an answer hoped for this Arch Linux article states:
It may be helpful to know that OLED displays by their nature do not have backlight.
The only solution therefor is to use something like this:
$ xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness .5- where
.5is 50% brightness,.63would be 63% brightness, etc.
I had a similar issue and i got around it by assigning the keyboard brightness-up key to
perl -e 'foreach $line (`xrandr --verbose`) {if ($line =~ "Brightness: (.+)") {my $b = $1 + 0.1; `xrandr --output eDP-1 --brightness $b`; exit;}}'and - 0.1 for the brightness-down key. Edit the output and increment value as needed.
Other solutions are in Screen brightness not working
