On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 12:33 +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> Patrick Schaaf has reported that the i915 driver is setting his
> backlight very dim when he starts GDM.
> 
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23472
> 
> It should be the dell-laptop platform driver controlling his backlight.
> 
> Gnome tries to restore the backlight settings through the dell_laptop
> interface in sysfs but it fails.  (Because the platform hardware refuses
> to set the settings to what it thinks they already are).

As far as my instrumentation showed, gnome did try no such thing - there
were no setting calls through the backlight interface when I switch
between the GDM screen and text console.

I have now run with drm.debug=0x07 and noticed get/set backlight PWM
messages from intel_panel_get/set_backlight which became lower and lower
in value for each successive switching between GDM login screen and text
console, until reaching a low point and overflowing to 255255.

I append the extract of these kernel messages, as well as putting them
in the bugzilla entry linked above.

Hope this helps clarify the problems I'm seeing.

best regards
  Patrick