backlight problems with 180.44

[pepe#]

Hi,

I use pommed in debian to regulate the backlight of my macbook pro(santa rosa, 8600M). Pommed originally used some low-level bios(?) calls to dim the LED backlight. I also have this here as a separate application. Linux recently got a driver for this, called mbp_nvidia_bl, but in the last versions(2.6.28) it did not work as smooth. Now I have 2.6.29. Debian also upgraded Xorg and the nvidia binary driver complained about incompatible API. So I upgraded the driver too.

Unfortunately, I now can not dim the backlight anymore, with either method. The separate tool also doesn't work anymore.

Anybody know what this is and how to fix it? The backlight is always full and on the MBP, this is pretty damn bright..

[pepe#]

it works on the console, before X is started and driver is loaded. Once X is started, I can also not get back to the console (just getting a blinking underscore)

[pepe#]

I have the same problem with 180.51 and even 180.18, which I think worked before. So this is probably (also) related to the new X server. I'm using Xorg 1.6.1 from debian unstable.

Anybody experiencing something similar? Suggestions for debugging/fixes?

[pepe#]

In case anybody ever encounteres similar issues or nvidia intends to fix the bug:

The problem only occurs when a second display is attached and X11 is run in multihead mode. The setting is remembered over X restarts and also works in the console.
Using nvidia-settings to set Xinerama mode results in awkward "crashes" after a few minutes. I think X returns into a broken(blank) console. TwinView works fine however.