Dell XPS 17 (9700)

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.
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states are not supported and have been replaced by "Modern Standby".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 fingerprint sensor can be used by installing the proprietary Ubuntu driver released by Dell and Goodix. This requires a different fork of libfprint
libfprint-tod-git
AUR
- available on the AUR and built from source
from the upstream repo
. This is a newer version intended for use only with touch-based sensors such as the one on the XPS.
Warning
This driver is proprietary, closed source and only distributed in binary form
The proprietary driver can be obtained from the AUR:
libfprint-2-tod1-xps9300-bin
AUR
. Alternatively, it can also be manually installed from the
Dell repository
by extracting the debian file and copying its contents.
The rest of the process is identical as that described on
Fprint
- just make sure not to install the version of libfprint on the main repo as 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
i8kutils
AUR
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.