Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (7390)
The New Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (7390) is the model released in mid 2019 in most territories and is the second iteration of the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 series, including an updated 10th generation Intel Ice Lake processor with Iris Plus integrated graphics. It can be used like a tablet when folding the display 180 degrees backwards and includes a enlarged 16:10 FHD+ or UHD touchscreen which should work out of the box. This includes support for Wacom pen technology (tested with the "Wacom Bamboo Ink Plus").
In order for Linux to see the internal NVMe SSD, it must be changed in the BIOS from the default "RAID mode" to "AHCI mode".
GPU acceleration does not appear to work beyond the first frame while the xf86-video-intel package is installed. The most visible symptom is that electron apps appear "frozen" in the first frame, only updating when the window size is changed. Support for the Gen11 Iris GPU is stable in the kernel as of 5.2.0, so the package is unnecessary. Especially users of arch derivatives may need to uninstall it manually.
As of kernel 5.4.6.arch3-1, no further modifications (in particular regarding LPSS and WiFi) are necessary for the installation and normal operations.
Additional features
Automatic screen rotation under GNOME and Wayland
Install the iio-sensor-proxy package. The screen will now automatically rotate and keyboard input will be disabled in tablet mode. If the screen does not rotate automatically, try running
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchscreen orientation-lock false
Alternatively, use Super+o to toggle lock state.
Troubleshooting
Intermittent display blackouts
Issues with the screen going black for a second on certain audio events have been resolved with kernel 5.4.12-arch1. You might need to update the kernel if you installed from older installation media.
Fingerprint Reader
There are currently no drivers available for the fingerprint reader. More information:
[1] libfprint issues adressing Goodix devices
[2] Older Goodix drivers
New work is being done on multiple Goodix fingerprint readers by reverse engineering the windows drivers:
[3] Blog post about the actual progress
[4] Discord server where all device dumps are posted
Camera
Intel published drivers for IPU4 on their repo for an old kernel. More information:
[5] IPU4 can be loaded on an old 4.19 kernel from Intel-LTS repo, still a work in progress
[6] Ubuntu Wiki page on the XPS 13 2-in-1.
S3 Sleep
The system defaults to Modern Standby (S0iX), which uses a lot of power during sleep. To enable S3 sleep instead, add mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line. However, now the screen will not be properly woken up on resume. To fix the screen wakeup issue, the following setting must be disabled in the BIOS settings:
POST Behaviour -> Sign of Life -> Early Dell Logo Display
[7]
Sleep/Suspend causes slow system
Issue exists with aggressive suspend settings in clock modulation settings. Setting the MSR registers manually during system wakeup using systemd is a good solution.
Run command `wrmsr -a 0x19a 0x0` to set the registers to zero after suspend. Check the registers with `rdmsr -a 0x19a `
Reference [8]
Thermal Throttling
By default, or whatever was set on Windows by Dell Power Manager, a very conservative power profile is set somewhere in memory (seems to persist BIOS resets) and starts throttling the CPU very early (2.4GHz out of 3.9GHz max on i7-1065G7).
This can be resolved using throttled. Despite originally conceived to resolve the same issue with Lenovo laptops, it works with Dell computers.
Backlight
If you want to use xbacklight without xf86-video-intel, you can install acpilight. Make sure to add yourself to the video group.
For more info, see Backlight.
Kernel Panic on Shutdown / Reboot / S3 Sleep / Hibernate
As of kernel 5.5, the system may kernel panic with a blinking Caps Lock light when attempting to Shutdown / Reboot / S3 Sleep / Hibernate. To fix the issue, either downgrade your kernel to 5.4.x linux-lts or add intel_iommu=off to your kernel parameters. [9]
Another workaround for the issue is to go into the BIOS of the laptop and DISABLE the option "VT for Direct I/O" in the "Virtualization" tab. [10]
Thunderbolt docks and external monitors
There is a known issue with the Dell Thunderbolt dock (WD19TB) that causes attached external monitors to lose the signal after anything between a few minutes and a few hours of use. A full power cycle resolves the issue temporarily. The fault is related to DisplayPort Multi-Stream-Transport (MST), which is used by the dock, and a faulty kernel implementation. The issue is being tracked here: [11].
Disabling MST resolves the issue, but limits the dock to drive only 1 display across all its outputs. To disable MST, add the i915.enable_dp_mst=0 kernel parameter, see Kernel parameters.
You can drive an additional display by connecting a ThunderBolt3-to-DisplayPort cable to the ThunderBolt-connector on the back side of the dock, which is passed through to the device without MST for a total of 2 external screens.
Hard crashes with IntelliJ IDEA
The Intel Ice Lake platform has a bug that causes the CPU to crash with certain compilation workloads of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE with old microcode versions.
The issue is resolved with the latest Microcode revision 0xa0 available with the intel-ucode package.