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Dell XPS 17 (9700)

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This article or section does not follow the Laptop page guidelines.

Reason: Missing function keys section, hardware table needs more PCI/USB IDs, some sections need to be reordered (Discuss in Talk:Dell XPS 17 (9700))
Hardware PCI/USB ID Working?
GPU (Intel) 8086:9bc4 Yes
GPU (NVIDIA) 10de:1f95 Yes
Wi-Fi 8086:06F0 Yes
Bluetooth 8087:0026 Partial
Audio 8086:06c8 Yes
Touchpad 04f3:311c Yes
Webcam 0bda:5510 Yes
Infrared emitters Yes
Ambient light sensor Unknown Yes
Fingerprint sensor 27c6:533c Yes
SD card reader 10ec:5260 Yes

Installation

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 Secure Boot#Using a signed boot loader
  • Disable Early Logo Display under Pre-boot Behaviour. This allows S1 sleep to function, as well as S3 sleep on some models. See #Power Management.

Dual Boot

Please note that changing from "RAID" to "AHCI" will break the default Windows installation and require a complete reinstall. The reinstall can be done through the Dell recovery in the BIOS.

Once reinstalled, Windows should boot normally in AHCI mode and without error. Then one can proceed with typical dual boot setup.

Firmware

Dell provides firmware updates that can be installed automatically using fwupd (or one of its graphical frontends such as Gnome Software or KDE Discover).

Alternatively, firmware updates can also be installed manually by downloading them from the support page and placing the .exe file on a FAT32 drive or the EFI system partition, then selecting the file in the BIOS update page after pressing F12 at boot time.

It is possible to install custom Secure Boot root keys in the BIOS and use them for Secure Boot with Linux.

Power Management

Sleep

Like many modern laptops, traditional S1/S3 states are not supported and have been replaced by "Modern Standby". The ACPI configuration causes the system to suspend to idle by default s2idle which allows the CPU to dynamically enter power saving states. In order for the system to maintain residency in the lower sleep states, the SATA mode may need to be set to "ACHI" instead of the default "RAID". For models configured with a 2060 series NVIDIA GPU, the proprietary NVIDIA driver may yield lower power usage in sleep states since power management is not supported for the nouveau driver as of the time of writing.

If the system seems to have a high power usage when idling, see Power management/Suspend and hibernate#Changing suspend method. As of the time of writing, S3 sleep mode does not seem to work for models with NVIDIA GPUs when on battery power. Users of variants with no dedicated GPU report S3 sleep to be working.

Hibernation

For hibernation to work, you must turn off "SMM Security Mitigation" under Security in the BIOS setup. Otherwise the system may freeze when attempting to hibernate.

GPU

Using the integrated intel iGPU instead of the dedicated GPU can provide power savings. There are various methods for utilising NVIDIA Optimus, however using PRIME#PRIME render offload seems to have the best performance on the 9700.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works out of the box, but sometimes tends to get stuck in a turned off mode after boot or after manually turning it off. Sometimes, this can be fixed by a simple restart of bluetooth.service, but frequently the only fix is to shut down the laptop and start it again.

Wi-Fi

Intel Killer AX1650s (i5 / i7 CPU models)

**Not sure if this is needed anymore... Test your Wi-Fi thoroughly before modifying this parameter. This may increase stability but reduce speeds.**

Wi-Fi may prompt you repeatedly for the Wi-Fi network password when connecting to a 5Ghz network. This has to do with the poor support of the 11n protocol. You can instruct the iwlwifi driver to not use the 11n protocol with its module parameters: 

/etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi-opt.conf
options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8

More information on this problem can be found here: Network configuration/Wireless#iwlwifi and https://cachestocaches.com/2016/1/disabling-ubuntus-broken-wi-fi-driver/

Qualcomm Killer AX500s DBS (i9 CPU models)

Occasionally after turning Wi-Fi off, attempting to turn it back on will fail and the only fix seems to be a full reboot of the device. Sometimes removing and reinserting the driver kernel module `ath11k_pci` also works.

Fingerprint sensor

The Goodix 27c6:533c sensor is built into the power button. It is a touch sensor, so touch it without pressing. The libfprint package in the official repositories does not support this sensor. There are two options: an experimental open-source driver or the proprietary driver from Dell and Goodix.

Open-source driver (experimental)

libfprint-goodix53x5-533c-gitAUR provides a native, open-source (LGPL) libfprint driver for the Goodix "Milan" 53x5 sensors, including the 533c. It is built from the goodix-533c-variant-ops branch, which adds 533c support to goodix53x5-libfprint (pull request #334, still under review). It needs no proprietary blobs.

The package ships its own pinned build of fprintd with a private copy of libfprint, so it conflicts with fprintd and replaces it. It also installs a udev rule that keeps the sensor working across suspend and hibernation.

After installation, enroll and verify a finger as described in Fprint (for example, execute fprintd-enroll and then fprintd-verify), and set up PAM the same way.

Note This driver is experimental. Upstream development and testing were done on the XPS 13 (9310). It has been reported to work for enrollment, verification and PAM login on the XPS 17 (9700). If the sensor stops responding after suspend, check the fprintd.service journal. Once 533c support is merged and released upstream, a non-git package should replace this one.

Proprietary driver

Warning This driver is proprietary, closed source and only distributed in binary form.

The proprietary Ubuntu driver released by Dell and Goodix needs the "TOD" (Touch OEM Drivers) fork of libfprint, libfprint-tod-gitAUR, built from the tod branch.

The driver itself is available as libfprint-2-tod1-xps9300-binAUR. Alternatively, download it from the Dell repository, extract the .deb file and copy its contents into place.

The rest of the process is the same as described in Fprint. Do not install libfprint from the official repositories, because it conflicts with libfprint-tod.


Thunderbolt

The following thunderbolt devices have been tested:

Device Working? Comments
Dell WD19TB 130W Yes Dual 4k through USB-c does not work, dual 4k using the thunderbolt upstream port is temperamental
Dell TB16[dead link 2023-04-23—HTTP 404] Yes –

Audio

This laptop requires Sound Open Firmware for the internal sound card to work.

Fan control

By default, fans are controlled by BIOS. Unfortunately even "Quiet" preset keeps fans spinning most of the time.

To change it, i8kmon from i8kutilsAUR can be used.

Details: Fan speed control#Dell laptops

BIOS Thermal Modes / Fan profiles

If you still decided to go with bios-driven fan control, you can switch thermal profiles like in Dell Power Manager from Windows. This can be done with smbios-thermal-ctl(1).

  • "Quiet" and "Cool Bottom" profiles limit CPU power to 11W (18W boost) and thus reduces overall system performance.
  • "Balanced" and "Performance" profiles remove this limit.
  • Thermal profile changes may not reliably alter the CPU power limit. When connected via Thunderbolt dock it appears to be worse.
  • In some circumstances after booting (particularly with "Quiet" profile), power may be limited to 10W.
  • Disconnecting and reconnecting power, changing thermal profile, or simply waiting may resolve these issues.