brightness @1.2: failed to get brightness of display 0x1 (error -536870201)

[MaurizioLoreti]

I have a MacBook Pro 16" with an M1 max processor. "brightness" fails with the following message:

MLO@Strider 5 $ brightness -lv
display 0: main, active, awake, online, built-in, ID 0x1
	resolution 1728 x 1117 pt (3456 x 2234 px) @ 120.0 Hz, origin (0, 0)
	physical size 344 x 223 mm
	IOKit flags 0x2000007; IOKit display mode ID 0x36
	usable for desktop GUI, uses OpenGL acceleration
brightness: failed to get brightness of display 0x1 (error -536870201)

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

This was fixed in the brightness repository last year:

​https://github.com/nriley/brightness/pull/36

But the developer has not yet released a new version containing the fix:

​https://github.com/nriley/brightness/issues/38

Nobody maintains this port. Feel free to submit pull requests to improve it, for example to include a patch based on the upstream PR (taking note that one changed line in the PR was not intentional, was reverted later, and should not be included in a port patch).

The ideal solution would be for the developer to release a new version containing the fix so that we can simply update to that version. You could encourage the developer to do that.

[MaurizioLoreti]

Solved.

1) go to https://github.com/nriley/brightness , download and unpack the software
2) cd brightness-master
3) CC=clang make
4) mv brightness.arm64 to brightness in your $PATH
5) enjoy