# \[SOLVED\] Color issues in Linux 6.9 **URL:** \ **Category:** Linux\ **Tags:** debian\ **Created:** [June 3, 2024, 11:55am UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158 "2024-06-03T11:55:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Richard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@Richard](https://community.frame.work/u/Richard)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2024, 11:55am UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/1 "2024-06-03T11:55:15Z")
Is someone experiencing something similar with Kernel 6.9? When compiling from source (using the config from 6.6.15 from Debian and otherwise setting defaults with `make olddefconfig`), I get a weird color issue: on USB power and on battery with performance mode activated from Gnome settings, everything looks fine, but when entering balanced - or worse, power saver - mode, everything kinda looks like the Gamma calibration is off or something like that. E.g. where I would see a light green background with white font in my webmailer (less than ideal combination, but usually still very well readable) the contrast seems to lessen within seconds of changing the power profile so the text becomes difficult to read and all in all, everything looks darker. I’m on Debian Testing with gnome-shell 46.2 from experimental. This doesn’t happen with any older Kernel branches, but consistently happens with 6.9-6.9.3. The question is, where would be the best place to report this issue, so a fix can be upstreamed before Debian catches up to 6.9 and I can report it there - but also since it’s an upstream issue it’s questionable if it’s the right place. I’ve taken some photos for showcasing, though it might be a bit difficult to judge from them: Normal view with Performance mode: [https://imgur.com/a/2dD0biL](https://imgur.com/a/2dD0biL) With powersave mode: [https://imgur.com/a/fWqzEfD](https://imgur.com/a/fWqzEfD) ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_Limonciello](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/mario_limonciello/32/19277_2.png) [@Mario\_Limonciello](https://community.frame.work/u/Mario_Limonciello)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2024, 1:21pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/2 "2024-06-03T13:21:20Z")
This is ABM, it automatically adjusts contrast and brightness to save some power. If you don’t like it there are multiple ways to disable it. - `amdgpu.abmlevel=0` on kernel command line - Disable the amdgpu panel power action in power profiles daemon systemd unit. ---
**Author:** ![Richard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@Richard](https://community.frame.work/u/Richard)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2024, 1:56pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/3 "2024-06-03T13:56:29Z")
Thanks, I’ll try that out. ---
**Author:** ![Richard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@Richard](https://community.frame.work/u/Richard)\ **Post date:** [June 3, 2024, 3:51pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/4 "2024-06-03T15:51:26Z")
That worked, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![RandomRanger](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/randomranger/32/15979_2.png) [@RandomRanger](https://community.frame.work/u/RandomRanger)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 1:49pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/5 "2024-07-03T13:49:18Z")
> [@Mario\_Limonciello](#): > > This is ABM, it automatically adjusts contrast and brightness to save some power. Would cranking the brightness up during situations where this is detrimental be a temporary work around? For me it’s only noticeable 1. In YouTube videos 2. On the Framework Community Forums orange banner All other content is more or less unaffected as far as I can tell. Obviously I can test if this works empirically, but I’m interested if changing the brightness according to the way the tech works, is _supposed_ to do that. E.g. will the contrast auto-adjust along with the brightness. Update: A more convenient workaround seems to be just going into performance mode when I want to watch YouTube, which would explain why I don’t have the behavior while plugged in because I have it configured to auto-switch. ---
**Author:** ![Richard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@Richard](https://community.frame.work/u/Richard)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 4:19pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/6 "2024-07-03T16:19:17Z")
At least that doesn’t change anything for me, as not only the brightness decreases, but also contrast - that’s why my guess is, that the gamma curve is being affected by this setting, as that’s typical behavior for that. And sadly not all content - especially web content - is sufficiently high contrast that this wouldn’t matter. ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_Limonciello](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/mario_limonciello/32/19277_2.png) [@Mario\_Limonciello](https://community.frame.work/u/Mario_Limonciello)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 6:19pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/7 "2024-07-03T18:19:04Z")
Yes if you crank the brightness up you negate the effects. Funny enough I was working on the series that allows the compositor to opt out of it and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. It’s because my brightness was at max already 🙂 [https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20240703051722.328-1-mario.limonciello@amd.com/](https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20240703051722.328-1-mario.limonciello@amd.com/) ---
**Author:** ![RandomRanger](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/randomranger/32/15979_2.png) [@RandomRanger](https://community.frame.work/u/RandomRanger)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 6:28pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/8 "2024-07-03T18:28:40Z")
Having a better understanding of how this feature is working has brought me a small, but noticeable, amount of inner peace. Thanks for making the world an incrementally better place by sharing 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![betalars](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/betalars/32/26161_2.png) [@betalars](https://community.frame.work/u/betalars)\ **Post date:** [July 2, 2024, 10:26pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/9 "2024-07-02T22:26:06Z")
I have no clue if this is a framework firmware issue or a linux issue or something in-between. But I am having really weird color behavior right now and I was wondering if anyone can reproduce this. Basically: as soon as the device is running on battery, its color reproduction goes nuts. The device loses some brightness, and I can understand this, but it also loses most color contrast. Especially dark colors will become really bright, rendering white text on colorful background difficult to read. Sometimes this even makes my own speech bubbles in telegram illegible. When it is really bad, all the colors seem blown-out as if I was taking an over-exposed picture. But as soon as I plug in a power brick, the dark colors are actually dark again and everything looks fine. Also the display becomes a bit brighter. I do a lot of color critical work and stuff like this is a bit scary to me … so help would be highly appreciated. Operating System: NixOS 24.11 KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.3.0 Qt Version: 6.7.1 Kernel Version: 6.9.5 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics Memory: 30.7 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics ---
**Author:** ![Amar\_Persaud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dfb087/32.png) [@Amar\_Persaud](https://community.frame.work/u/Amar_Persaud)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 1:56am UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/10 "2024-07-03T01:56:02Z")
I am also experiencing this but mainly trying to get my power usage down at the moment I’m on Kubuntu/KDE, kernel 6.9.3 I believe I’ve managed to fix it following [this](http://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/2) from Mario. The issue is automatic contrast and brightness adjustment, the settings for which dont appear to show up in the KDE settings (though IIRC do show up in the base Ubuntu / gnome settings menu) In essence, I added `amdgpu.abmlevel=0` to my command line parameters to disable it ---
**Author:** ![betalars](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/betalars/32/26161_2.png) [@betalars](https://community.frame.work/u/betalars)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 10:15am UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/11 "2024-07-03T10:15:32Z")
Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![RandomRanger](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/randomranger/32/15979_2.png) [@RandomRanger](https://community.frame.work/u/RandomRanger)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 1:49pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/12 "2024-07-03T13:49:58Z")
I’ve been noticing this on Arch/Plasma as well and thought I was going nuts. This thread should probably be merged with the other one. > [@\[SOLVED\] Color issues in Linux 6.9](http://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/3): > > Thanks, I’ll try that out. ---
**Author:** ![Numerfolt](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/numerfolt/32/24318_2.png) [@Numerfolt](https://community.frame.work/u/Numerfolt)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 4:45pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/13 "2024-07-03T16:45:04Z")
I had the same problem, thanks OP for asking that question again! ---
**Author:** ![RandomRanger](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/randomranger/32/15979_2.png) [@RandomRanger](https://community.frame.work/u/RandomRanger)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 5:39pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/14 "2024-07-03T17:39:30Z")
I double checked the Linux Kernel documentation, and it’s documented as disabled by default. I recall @Mario_Limonciello may have mentioned that this may be changing to enabled in a kernel version (6.8/6.9?). Is this documentation out of date then? > **abmlevel (uint)** > > Override the default ABM (Adaptive Backlight Management) level used for DC enabled hardware. Requires DMCU to be supported and loaded. Valid levels are 0-4. A value of 0 indicates that ABM should be disabled by default. Values 1-4 control the maximum allowable brightness reduction via the ABM algorithm, with 1 being the least reduction and 4 being the most reduction. > > _Defaults to -1, or disabled. Userspace can only override this level after boot if it’s set to auto._ This doc also appears to indicate that both `0` and `-1` represent disabled. [https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/amdgpu/module-parameters.html](https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/amdgpu/module-parameters.html) Edit: I believe this is the thread I was referencing | [Adaptive Backlight Management (ABM) - #54 by Mario\_Limonciello](http://community.frame.work/t/adaptive-backlight-management-abm/41055/54) ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_Limonciello](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/mario_limonciello/32/19277_2.png) [@Mario\_Limonciello](https://community.frame.work/u/Mario_Limonciello)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 6:18pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/15 "2024-07-03T18:18:11Z")
-1 is userspace control. 0 is disabled. ---
**Author:** ![RandomRanger](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/randomranger/32/15979_2.png) [@RandomRanger](https://community.frame.work/u/RandomRanger)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 6:22pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/16 "2024-07-03T18:22:39Z")
Ah, so `-1` is what enables ppd to control it from userspace. PPD can then be configured to ignore it (the now non-default behavior as of I believe version 0.2), hence the systemctl unit configuration option. Alternatively, it abm can be disabled entirely at the kernel level with `0` and it’s no longer a feature for ppd or other userspace applications to even mess with. Assuming what I said correctly interprets what you said, I have a much better understanding now. Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_Limonciello](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/mario_limonciello/32/19277_2.png) [@Mario\_Limonciello](https://community.frame.work/u/Mario_Limonciello)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2024, 6:42pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/17 "2024-07-03T18:42:44Z")
Yup you got it spot on. The third way to disable it is the series I posted, but the compositor will need to add a knob for it. Kde has it prototyped. ---
**Author:** ![Numerfolt](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/numerfolt/32/24318_2.png) [@Numerfolt](https://community.frame.work/u/Numerfolt)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2024, 11:21pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/18 "2024-07-06T23:21:32Z")
I added `amdgpu.abmlevel=0` to my grub commandline but the screen still changes color when switching between energy saving and performance mode while running on battery. Kernel 6.9.1-060901-generic Anything I may have done wrong? ---
**Author:** ![Mario\_Limonciello](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.frame.work/mario_limonciello/32/19277_2.png) [@Mario\_Limonciello](https://community.frame.work/u/Mario_Limonciello)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2024, 12:11pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/19 "2024-07-07T12:11:23Z")
Perhaps you forgot to run `update-grub`. ---
**Author:** ![Richard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@Richard](https://community.frame.work/u/Richard)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2024, 2:22pm UTC](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158/20 "2024-07-07T14:22:03Z")
Exactly what I meant with it looks like the Gamma curve is off in this mode. And I even have set a color profile in Gnome Settings, so all necessary information for accurate color information should be present, but it all just goes nuts. So yeah, as long as this isn’t being done properly, better turn that mode off, it harms more than it helps. [Next page](https://community.frame.work/t/solved-color-issues-in-linux-6-9/52158.md?page=2)