Recently I've been having issues with the backlight on my Lenovo W530 running Rawhide. Sometimes it would work, but didn't most of the time. It was really a minor issue - so I didn't sweat it much (although it really hurt battery life). I finally filed a bug against it and got some feedback I thought might be useful to others (since you might not find the bug report with google-troubleshooting).
Thanks to poma for putting this list together!
PS - The option that works for me is booting with "acpi_backlight=vendor"
// Roshi
Options to try to fix your backlight issues:
Some of them are the following:
acpi_osi=Linux
acpi_osi="!Windows 2012"
video.use_native_backlight=1
$ modinfo video
parm: use_native_backlight:int
acpi_backlight=vendor
acpi_backlight= [HW,ACPI]
acpi_backlight=vendor
acpi_backlight=video
If set to vendor, prefer vendor specific driver
(e.g. thinkpad_acpi, sony_acpi, etc.) instead
of the ACPI video.ko driver.
thinkpad-acpi.brightness_enable=1
$ modinfo thinkpad_acpi
parm: brightness_enable:Enables backlight control when 1, disables when 0 (uint)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Section "Device"
Identifier "devname"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
EndSection
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
man 4 intel
Option "Backlight" "string" Override the probed backlight control interface. Sometimes the automatically selected backlight interface may not correspond to the correct, or simply most useful, interface available on the system. This allows you to override that choice by specifying the entry under /sys/class/backlight to use.
man 1 xrandr --brightness brightness
man 1 xbacklight