Hi Joey, I also suffered from this bug on a Lenovo Ideapad.Today linux 3.11.10-1 made it into testing, which resulted in the starting backlight to change from totally black to maximal brightness. But now, the brightness cannot any more be adjusted with the Fn keys during booting. As soon as Gnome (more precisely gdm) is started, the Fn keys work again.
Do you experience the same? Best regards, Andreas