The Asus Gaming Laptop Acpi Firmware Bug

Which I'm ready to believe, knowing the state of most laptops... but this entire thing is pretty clearly generated by Gemini with its over-the-top dramatic style, italics emphasis, and -isms like "It's not just X, it's Y", which was unable to handle the article of this size and started looping over. Not sure I should believe any of it, or at least be sure that it didn't mess up the specifics. Why would one do this in a technical writeup?

My Lenovo X1E regularly burns 20% of its CPU cycles on some high frequency recurring interrupt. I did get pretty far with debugging it, but eventually gave up since I can't justify spending so much time on fixing a 'professional' laptop that I paid top dollar for.

It also has a multi-GPU setup that has never worked reliably under Linux, which is ironic as I opted for Lenovo due to its supposedly good Linux compatibility.

Switching between GPU modes is a hit or mis, waking up from stand-by often results in a blank screen, screen flickering, sporadic high fan speeds, etc. And then there's the coil whine, which seems to be fixed in some BIOS versions, then returns in the next. Supposedly it has something to do with power-saving measures.

Since I owned it there have been at least 20 BIOS version releases for 'improved performance and security', but none seem to actually fix anything. It's such a mess.

/rant

a) one time charging stopped working... thankfully I had a pretty full charge when I noticed and was able to migrate my data to a spare machine and not have to deal with it... removable storage would have been super handy.

b) for a whole year, there was about a 25% chance of loud static instead of music when I started playing a stream in iTunes; pause and play again would fix it most of the time. It started when I installed a named OS revision, and it stopped when I installed the next version. Did not have issues with sounds from other apps. Of course, there was no information to be found anywhere about this, because 'macs just work'

Less big, but if Outlook was running when I put the laptop to sleep, there was a good chance it would continue to eat battery and generate heat in my bag. Outlook is a travesty, but when the corp runs Exchange, Outlook is less effort to make work compared to fighting to make auth work with anything else and then still having to use Outlook from time to time.

Would you push gamers/VR people to macs ??

As I write this, the fans are either completely stopped or so slow that I cannot hear them. The fans can get a little "whooshy" under load, but nothing out of line with other Windows laptops, as far as I can tell.

I'm running under Windows profile (not one of the ASUS-specific ones in Armory Crate). I also limit the battery to 60%, since I'm mostly using it plugged-in, with external monitor and keyboard. A month ago, I upgraded RAM to 40 GB and added another 4 TB SSD (and cleaned the fans in the process, so it's even quieter). I think I'll keep this machine for a few more years...

That being said, I did experience occasional cursor stuttering, but mostly when the machine is under load (typically during Visual Studio build).

I'm sure dell does the same terrible handling of DGPU power and badly written ISRs that pointless raise system latency. I had shoddy crashes for months that would cause my dell laptop to BSOD and burn up in my backpack because the DGPU got stuck on I a loop during some ridiculous windows modern standby wakeup.

Replacing the battery costs like $200-500 because the screen likes to explode when removing it.

Lenovo docks of a specific gen will have the USB hub/billboard just crash and stop doing display port.

older Dell docks would pollute arp tables and crash switches.

Computers have always had some wild flaws, some worse than others. They are built to a price point typically and by humans under politics so the best design or parts usually don't make it -- cost and profit.

Unfortunately you need to disable signing for that, which will trigger anticheat in online games and makes Windows nag you about it.

Someone wrote a bootloader specifically to patch ACPI on boot in CSM mode if you're okay with reinstalling Windows on an older system that can't play certain games: https://github.com/MovAX0xDEAD/ACPI-Patcher

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/61253-power-your-macbook-pro...

I don't think I ever put any of my laptops into dGPU-only mode via MUX, it's stupidly power hungry with little upside.

In any other industry everyone would be returning their acquisitions day one.

About 35 years ago, I had a teacher asserting computers are like buying shoes that randomly explode when tying them.

Thankfully consumer laws are finally happening.

The laptop works fine in Optimus mode even with external displays, you just lost a bit of performance and you're missing out on some display features like G-Sync. So it is highly likely that most users always use the laptop in Optimus mode. If you primarily use the laptop as a laptop you probably wouldn't even know the mux feature existed.

The problem is Asus shipping extra features in their hardware that are not properly QA tested. It looks like they only thoroughly tested the golden path.

One was the first gen Alienware M17 with two GTX 270M GPUs (yes two) and an onboard nvidia GPU whose specific model I can't remember. That one suffered from stutters and audio crackling, etc. It was sort of fixed by disabling SLI and the onboard GPU and sticking to a specific driver that was modded, the driver was by someone on the notebookcheck forums IIRC. Later on I think it got somewhat patched with a bios update that let you use SLI without the stutters, but I think the laptop reached EOL without it being fully fixed.

The second was an ROG ASUS laptop with a GTX 460m (I can't recall the laptop model). Pretty much the same story as the OP but I didn't have the knowhow to go deep into the ACPI code. The only change from the story is that latencymon kept attributing the latency spikes to multiple dlls, sometimes it was some wifi driver, other times it was an nvidia one. I don't remember the full fix for that one, but it involved me changing the wifi card and disabling the dGPU (not the onboard one) when I was not gaming so I could watch videos and such without it crackling. Funnily enough it didn't crackle much when actually playing games (it still happened, just very rarely).

I stopped buying gaming laptops after that. Seeing this story makes me think things haven't changed one bit.

The laptop was absolutely useless at playing games, because it would throttle itself thermally after about 30 seconds. Which was ironic given that I used to work at a games development company and the ability to play games was actually a core feature of the product. I then used to have a Razer Blade 15 which wasn't as bad but would also eventually start throttling hard - just inadequate cooling imho.

Funnily enough I have a much cheaper MSI gaming laptop now with an i7 and a 3070Ti and that never throttles, I can run games without it slowing down. But clearly the cooling system in it is massively overbuilt, which is great.

However, this is not the only problem with Asus bioses. My daughter has one and it randomly locks up if you add an extra SSD, sooner or later depending on the SSD. You'll blame the SSD's firmware, but the most locking one was one that I have in two desktops with no problems...

ASUS at the time had an exclusive deal with AMD to ship their Ryzen 4xxxHS line.

Initially it worked fine, but two years later performance was already much worse and dominated by thermal throttling. Repasting, though necessary due to the state of the paste, only helped partially.

I still don't know the root cause of the issue, but I investigated declining battery performance and it turned out that the iGPU was going full throttle at all times. Setting the dGPU as the preferred device actually improved battery life somewhat.

When mechanical failures started accumulating I switched to a FW16 and never looked back. I don't care what gaming laptop manufacturers have on offer and for how little if I can't buy having them give a shit about their products and customers.

This might be a culture issue. At least we should push for popular benchmark solutions to include latency tests. In ideal world laptop reviewers should also test keyboard latency but I do not see how it might be automated.

They're like four-seater off-road motorcycles. You have to NOT understand how sketchy that concept is to consider one. The engineers has to know that they're guilty to be involved in it.

What's sad is that a lot of buyers are falling for it from the presumption that laptops are the most standard and regular type of computers. But I guess there's little we could do about it.

It's a gaming laptop. If you're playing any game released in the past 5 years, odds are you're getting constant stutters anyway due to Unreal Engine 5. And Windows 11 is a slow, bloated mess, too, so that covers stutters outside of games.

For most end users, and especially gamers, stuttering and overall bad performance is just the new normal that they've come to accept and even embrace. The recent success of Borderlands 4, a game that struggles to run smoothly on the best and most expensive hardware available today, is just the latest and best proof of this. If you complain about it, you'll be called poor for not owning a $3000 GPU and/or a luddite for not wanting to play at 720p 30fps AI-upscaled to 4K 300fps.

I've had weird issues with this setup since the core2duo days upgrading once a year.

when it works it's amazing, however.

AMD igpu and dgpu work super well together but I feel like over time, since I use this configuration the most things either improve or go to hell with driver updates. depends on the laptop OEM really.

This all said, where the hell are the strix points igpus where they rival desktop cards (yes the lower mid end) at laptops where stuff just works without compromise ...if there is power and cooling.

Side note - I have a rog g14 that until I loaded a beta bios for thunderbolt over usb4 would reboot when shut down and shut down randomly. (amd CPU and GPU)

I am not surprised by this story.

Those do very much exist! My go-to is System76. There are others, e.g. arguably Framework.

> and are rewarded for that...

Oh well, one can dream anyway.

The freedom Linux gives you also gives you the freedom to slap Linux on some random bit of Windows kit and then blame Linux for failing to work around the broken firmware. Apparently this is preferable to buying hardware that works with Linux.

Maybe the author is ESL or just not very good at writing...

If it's clearer and the information is still all correct - then isn't that great? More people can engage in clear communication with each other

> I used an LLM for wording. The research, traces, and AML decomp are mine. Every claim is verified and reproducible if you follow the steps in the article; logs and commands are in the repo. If you think something's wrong, cite the exact timestamp/method/line. "AI wrote it" is not an argument.

I managed to reverse engineer a lot of my laptop's features but hit a wall when it came to this ACPI stuff. I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but all I got was stub code. I wanted to be the guy who wrote the Linux drivers for his own laptop but I just didn't manage it. Massive respect for anyone who can do this.

- this sounds ubiquitous and reproducible. How did this not get fed back through tech support/RMA channels? Was there so little evidence that it wasn't correlateable, or did ASUS look and arrive at an incorrect conclusion, eg batch of bad silicon? Could it be that they had plentiful evidence and were negligent or incompetent?

- it sounds like this is plainly evident when using the machine. What is the QA process? This should not have been possible to miss?

- now that they know, what will they do?

Imo, the ceo calculus here is clear. If you're a luxury good with elastic demand, you fix the issue and fix the perception (two separate things). Multi-year, multifaceted issues like this have the potential to ruin a brand. I've bought ROG in the past, and I'm inclined to never do so again.

EDIT: on further reflection, the firmware bug itself is pretty troubling. the other bugs i get - hardware assumptions were changed, or good code was reused that didnt know or support the gpu mux, i see how those errors comes about. the method sleeping an interrupt... is awful? how did that get reviewed? what is that firmware test suite?