Repository navigation
Touchbar is glitching #32
Description
Model: Macbook Pro M1 2020, 8GB memory
Environment: hyprland with sway
OS: Asahi Fedora
glitch.mp4
When the problem occurs ?
It occurs in multiple cases,
case one : whenever the touchbar gets into sleeping mode, it occurs (after the lights of touchbar is off it starts glitching)
case two : while booting fedora (while booting macOS there is no glitch on the touchbar) i guess the touchbar isnt active yet so it occurs as it was in the sleep mode
Details
There is no major problem with it, let's say touchbar got into the sleeping mode then the glitch starts to occur, after a long while if the system is still inactive (that there is no user input) glitch stops then the touchbar also stops working i guess the tiny-dfr service shuts down itself.
When i reboot or shutdown the computer i see the error with tiny-dfr service for a little short amount of time, it is not being captured by asahi-diagnose so i do not know what is going on with it.
I uninstalled and installed asahi many times, tried with other desktop environments which are Gnome desktop with wayland, KDE with wayland, however, same issue persists.
How can i resolve this issue or will there be any updates on it ?
Activity
WhatAmISupposedToPutHere commentedon Feb 13, 2024
I am not sure that the issue is fixable, since only apple code runs during the boot picker phase. Does it happen every time or just sometimes? And was it a cold boot of the machine.
Sleep might be fixable since i only command the display to turn off, instead of completely tearing down the MIPI link, however it is hard, since i can't reproduce it on my machine.
emrnky commentedon Feb 13, 2024
It happens every time, if it is a cold boot if the last OS used was Asahi, then it happens because it boots Fedora directly there is no such case with booting macOS. Disturbance of flashing lights is not a problem while booting since it takes a short time to boot.
The major problem is that, while using the OS it also happens every time whenever the user input is inactive, lets say you are watching a movie and you do not touch the computer, once the sleeping mode is activated it starts to flash.
There is no problem with the functioning of the touchbar
I wish, I could provide some information, checked the journalctl with -f flag while restarting the tiny-dfr service there is no info provided in journal, also tried asahi diagnose there is no info about tiny-dfr again but still I will attach my diagnosis.
EDIT: After I saved the journalctl it actually showed up some info about tiny-dfr sorry for misleading info before
asahi-diagnose-20240213-222915.txt
file.log
WhatAmISupposedToPutHere commentedon Feb 15, 2024
Can you follow the following steps and tell me if glitches are still present?
emrnky commentedon Feb 15, 2024
Never done this kind of operation before, just to clarify, are these the steps to perform ?
git clone -b sleep https://github.com/WhatAmISupposedToPutHere/linux.git
cd linux
make defconfig
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make modules_install install
if these are the steps to perform then i got this error after performing the install command,
dracut-install: Failed to find module 'nvme_apple'
dracut: FAILED: /usr/lib/dracut/dracut-install -D /var/tmp/dracut.8yiNZj/initramfs --kerneldir /lib/modules/6.6.0-asahi-g502bf25d37a1/ -m apple_mailbox nvme_apple pinctrl-apple-gpio macsmc macsmc-rtkit i2c-apple tps6598x apple-dart dwc3 dwc3-of-simple nvmem-apple-efuses phy-apple-atc xhci-plat-hcd xhci-pci pcie-apple gpio_macsmc spi-apple spi-hid-apple spi-hid-apple-of rtc-macsmc simple-mfd-spmi spmi-apple-controller nvmem_spmi_mfd apple-dockchannel dockchannel-hid apple-rtkit-helper
and when i am booting i select the new kernel option it doesnt run
WhatAmISupposedToPutHere commentedon Feb 15, 2024
make defconfig is wrong, you should look for the distro kernel config in /boot (the file is named config-something), copy it to kernel build directory, rename it to .config and then build the kernel.
emrnky commentedon Feb 17, 2024
Sorry for the late response, here is what happened,
6.6.3-413.asahi.fc39.aarch64+16k == as version of .config
I built and booted into the new kernel
emrnky commentedon Feb 24, 2024
New update on the touchbar,
It started to happen also on OSX, and I started do some research about it and seems like wast majority of people who has a macbook model with touchbar have had this flickering problem. Seems like its more apple kind of an issue that by the time it gets damaged by the humidity of the environment or some software level issues turns it into a hardware level problem. But I am not surely saying this 'hardware problem' because it functions well, just brings in some flicker. ( in OSX I tried to disable auto brightness of the display and the keyboard it affected a little bit in the good way)
So your code has no problems, I guess the problem is in my touchbar. How could i resolve this issue by disabling going idle when the system is up (I always use it on battery so do not care about power consumage ) or, if the system is not up then also tiny dfr can also go disabled but then how can it get activated.
Because on OSX it gets disabled completely when idled if you touch it, it comes back in it prevents that flicker while 'idling', so the flickering only happens while using it (but so rarely).
On the other hand while on Asahi it never happens while the touchbar is 'active', it only happens in the case when it goes idle. That what makes a conflict here.
That is the best information I could give if there is some extra things that I can do please tell me.
I can take all the instructions and execute them, would like to contribute in this community since everything is new, the device the OS so in the future it does not happen to anybody else.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
voidpointer0 commentedon Dec 8, 2025
Just wanted to mention that I have exactly the same experience - Asahi fixed my touchbar, it only flickers during idle, and stops when I tap the touchpad, which is so much better than the constant macOS flicker. If someone has any advice on how to eliminate it, I'd also appreciate it.
WhatAmISupposedToPutHere commentedon Dec 8, 2025
I am very hesitant to recommend this due to oled aging concerns, but if you want to try random stuff - change this line https://github.com/AsahiLinux/tiny-dfr/blob/master/src/backlight.rs#L135 to be 1 instead and recompile. It will make it so the touchbar never goes off when the machine is on, and has the lid open.
voidpointer0 commentedon Dec 11, 2025
Thanks, will try this once it starts to really bother me.
voidpointer0 commentedon Feb 3, 2026
@WhatAmISupposedToPutHere thanks for the help, unfortunately after pulling the latest repo and applying the suggested change, then recompiling and replacing tiny-dfr with the updated version, the problem persists. Any other suggestions?
@Emirhankayar did you ever manage to fix it perhaps?
eyezahhhh commentedon Oct 22, 2026
This has been infuriating me for over a year, finally did something about it. On my 2020 m1 mbp at least, it seems to flash when the touchbar brightness is below a certain threshold (~85/225), so I added a MinimumBrightness setting that mitigates it. It still supports sleeping the touchbar too, it just sets the brightness to the minimum value and displays nothing. Since it's OLED you can't tell the difference.
https://github.com/eyezahhhh/tiny-dfr
No idea if this is actually a good solution, but it works for me.
Natetgmaxwell commentedon Oct 24, 2026
Same symptom on a MacBookPro17,1 (13" M1), kernel 7.1.12-2-7-ARCH (Asahi), tiny-dfr 0.3.7: the Touch Bar flickers when it goes to sleep, only while idle.
I tested by stopping tiny-dfr and writing to /sys/class/backlight/228600000.dsi.0 directly:
So on my unit the flash is the cut to 0, not low brightness in general. That doesn't match the ~85/255 threshold another commenter saw.
Changing the idle-off branch in update_backlight (src/backlight.rs) to return DIMMED_BRIGHTNESS instead of 0 fixed it for me. The bar stays dim and never goes fully off. That's the same change the maintainer suggested earlier, which didn't work for another user, so it may depend on the unit.