Dell XPS 15 (9510)

This article or section does not follow the
Laptop page guidelines
.
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
Wi-Fi
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
boot loader
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
The key is visible to
xev
and similar tools
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
.
Note
The firmware driver download link provided in the article is dead.
Here
is the direct link to the firmware driver on Dell.com.
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
Dell XPS 15 (generic)
Dell XPS 15 9560 (2017)
Dell XPS 15 9570 (2018)
Dell XPS 15 7590 (2019)
Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 9575 (2018)
Dell XPS 13 (9310)