Brightness not changing on latest xf86-video-intel

[bandali]

On Arch, xf86-video-intel was bumped to latest master 2 days ago, and it breaks mba6x_bl such that increasing or decreasing the brightness has no effect. The value reported by xbacklight does change, but there's no actual change in how bright the screen is.

Last known good commit: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=eb01cc549d4d5544833ff6da4d79bc63587fd5ca
Current commit (broken): https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=714052fb32a3c521efb295f2c400a673d515fb77

On the bright side, there are only 7 commits between those two commits, so it shouldn't be too hard to track down the cause.

[bandali]

@patjak Any thoughts?

P.S. it's still broken as of this commit: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=dad64e9f76c718033402be7bfd2129866d492304

[taylorthurlow]

Still broken it looks like.

[taylorthurlow]

I found a workaround. Because the bug is an issue with xf86-video-intel, I did some digging and found this discussion on Reddit, where people suggested removing xf86-video-intel entirely. I had no issues doing so, with the exception of the xbacklight function no longer working.

Here is what I did as a workaround: I installed mba6x_bl as normal, then installed light-git from AUR. I can now set backlight as normal using light -s mba6x_backlight -S 20 where 20 is the backlight percentage.