Dell Latitude D630 from 2007 has Gigabit Ethernet!

Today I looked up the specs for my 2007 Dell Latitude D630 and noticed that it supposedly supports Gigabit Ethernet.

I ran lspci and ethtool to get more info on the Ethernet controller:

[archjun@arch ~]$ ethtool -i enp9s0

driver: tg3

version: 3.137

firmware-version: 5755m-v3.29

bus-info: 0000:09:00.0

supports-statistics: yes

supports-test: yes

supports-eeprom-access: yes

supports-register-dump: yes

supports-priv-flags: no

[archjun@arch ~]$ ethtool enp9s0

Settings for enp9s0:

Supported ports: [ TP ]

Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 

                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 

                        1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full 

Supported pause frame use: No

Supports auto-negotiation: Yes

Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 

                        100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 

                        1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full 

Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric

Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes

Link partner advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 

                                     100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 

                                     1000baseT/Full 

Link partner advertised pause frame use: Symmetric

Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: Yes

Speed: 1000Mb/s

Duplex: Full

Port: Twisted Pair

PHYAD: 1

Transceiver: internal

Auto-negotiation: on

MDI-X: off

Cannot get wake-on-lan settings: Operation not permitted

Current message level: 0x000000ff (255)

       drv probe link timer ifdown ifup rx_err tx_err

Link detected: yes

[archjun@arch ~]$ lspci

...

09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)

ethtool also verifies that the speed is 1000Mb/s and indicates that the Broadcom card uses the tg3 driver.

I was unaware that my old D630 Latitude had Gigabit Ethernet because I never had the chance to connect this machine to Gigabit-capable network hardware until recently. It is ironic that this old notebook that is 8 years old has more capable Ethernet than my Lenovo S310 work laptop, which only supports up to 100Mb/s and uses the Realtek r8169 driver:

[archjun@lenovoS310 bin]$ sudo ethtool enp1s0

[sudo] password for archjun: 

Settings for enp1s0:

Supported ports: [ TP MII ]

Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 

                       100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 

Supported pause frame use: No

Supports auto-negotiation: Yes

Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 

                       100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 

Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only

Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes

Speed: 10Mb/s

Duplex: Half

Port: MII

PHYAD: 0

Transceiver: internal

Auto-negotiation: on

Supports Wake-on: pumbg

Wake-on: g

Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)

      drv probe ifdown ifup

Link detected: no

[archjun@lenovoS310 bin]$ sudo ethtool -i enp1s0

driver: r8169

version: 2.3LK-NAPI

firmware-version: 

bus-info: 0000:01:00.0

supports-statistics: yes

supports-test: no

supports-eeprom-access: no

supports-register-dump: yes

supports-priv-flags: no

Workaround for the intel_backlight bug in Linux kernel 3.14.x

After upgrading from Linux kernel 3.13 to 3.14 at the beginning of April 2014, on the next boot the screen on my Dell Latitude D630 using Intel GM965 Express integrated graphics was barely visible due to the backlight being set too low.

Adjusting the brightness manually using Fn-up/down arrow fails to work. A quick Google search reveals that this issue is well-known:

Display brightness adjustment not working with kernel 3.14 and Intel IvyBridge (Bugzilla)

Backlight control broken on Dell XPS13 w/ kernel 3.14-rc7

According to the second link, the fix will be included in mainline Linux kernel 3.15 and may or may not be backported to kernel 3.14.

To manually enable backlight control on my system, first I queried /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness:


[archjun@arch ~]$ cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness 
255000

The max screen brightness on the Latitude D630 is 255000. I then set the intel_backlight brightness to a medium value, 100000:

[archjun@arch ~]$ su -c "echo 100000 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"

You can give intel_backlight any value between 0 and max_brightness. After manually setting the backlight value, the screen is visible and responds to one or two Fn-up/down arrow keypresses, but I wasn't able to get the Fn brightness keys working 100% properly. For now, I just set screen brightness manually using the above command on the CLI with various brightness values.

Update 2014-06-19:

After recently upgrading to Linux kernel 3.15.1 I noticed that once intel_backlight brightness has been set, adjusting screen brightness using Fn-up/down arrows works fine. The only caveat is that at boot the systemd-backlight service is not correctly loading backlight settings from the last session.

systemctl output for systemd-backlight:

systemd-backlight@backlight:dell_backlight.service loaded active exited    Load/Save
systemd-backlight@backlight:intel_backlight.service loaded active exited    Load/Save

Perhaps dell_backlight.service is conflicting with intel_backlight? After manually setting the brightness by echoing a value between 0 and 255000 to intel_backlight, the Fn-keys are then enabled for brightness adjustments.

I got tired of typing

[archjun@arch ~]$ su -c "echo 150000 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"

every time I log in to a new session, so I defined a custom udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d that explicitly sets a brightness value for intel_backlight:

#Set backlight level to medium (max 255000)
SUBSYSTEM=="backlight", ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="intel_backlight", ATTR{brightness}="150000"

Now at boot this brightness value takes effect. I found the udev hack in the Archlinux forums here.

Update 2014-07-19:

In Linux kernel 3.15.5, the Intel backlight bug no longer occurs on my Dell D630 Latitude. Brightness control with the Fn keys also works flawlessly.

I have removed my custom udev rule setting intel_backlight at boot and everything still works fine.