Dell XPS 13 9343

Hardware specs
All variants of this model come with 5th-gen Intel processors and have an option of a touchscreen with HD+ display.


 * i3-5010U, i5-5200U, i7-5500U or i7-5600U processor
 * 13.3" LCD screen (3200x1800 touchscreen display or 1920x1080without touchscreen)
 * Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics
 * 4-8 GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
 * 128-512 GB Samsung SSD
 * 2x USB 3 ports
 * mini-DisplayPort output
 * Broadcom DW1560 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + Bluetooth 4.0 or Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + Bluetooth 4.0

USB
The two USB 3 ports require the xHCI driver to function with USB 3 devices and the EHCI driver to function with non-USB 3 devices. Any removable USB drive will also require USB Mass storage support.

Wireless
The Broadcom BCM4352 wireless adapter requires the use of the official Broadcom driver. This driver is proprietary and requires that several kernel options be (un)set before installation:

After compiling the new kernel, emerge broadcom-sta:

Reboot to the new kernel and make sure the new Broadcom module is loaded

If all goes well, you should have a working wireless interface

The configuration for the Intel adapter is similar, but no other package than linux-firmware needs to be installed:

Bluetooth
Much like the Broadcom wireless chipset, the Broadcom BCM2045A0 Bluetooth chipset also requires proprietary firmware. If you are booting the kernel using EFi stub, you will need to compile the kernel bluetooth options as modules:

If you compile the Bluetooth components into the kernel, the firmware is not available at the time the kernel loads, the firmware is not loaded and the Bluetooth system is not initialised. Compiling as a module ensures that the firmware is available at module autoload, and the system is initialised successfully.

This may be obviated if you use an initramfs, or when the firmware becomes available as part of the kernel source tree.

The Arch wiki provides information on how to download and extract the firmware, and where to place it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_%282016%29#Bluetooth

Remember to set the appropriate Bluetooth USE flags.

ALSA sound
The built-in sound card has two different components: Standard audio output and audio output using the HDMI port. It is necessary to configure ALSA so that these are loaded in the proper order.

Synaptics Touchpad
The touchpad runs off of an I2C bus and needs some special kernel drivers to be installed:

MMC/SD Card Reader
The MMC/SD slot is located on the right side of the laptop, next to the right USB port. It is relatively easy to use with the proper kernel config.

Loss of horizontal sync when switching TTYs
A bug is present in current kernel versions that results in horizontal sync loss on Broadwell machines when switching TTYs. To fix it, you can add i915.enable_ips=0 to your kernel command-line as a workaround.

GPU hang/freeze4 with external display
An issue appears present on QHD display models that may result in GPU hangs/freezing when manipulating the displays with xrandr on kernels 4.0 and up. Ensure i915.preliminary_hw_support=0 is set as this appears to alleviate this issue.

Display Blanking randomly
This issue appears to be related to high resolutions on both the internal display as well as 4k external displays. Preliminary testing indicates that the i915.preliminary_hw_support=0 option being set significantly reduces or removes the issue.