The Final Zone project

This blog is written on Fedora 25 Design Suite running on ASUS X550ZE .The upgrade from Design Suite 24 to 25 using Gnome Software went smooth with very little impact to the entire system. Fedora 25 Design Suite with supported Dedicated Graphic card on a hybrid laptop Inheriting the features from Fedora 25 Workstation , Design Suite now gained further support of hybrid hardware notably laptops (see above feature). Following the release cycle, supplemental wallpapers from Fedora 23 are replaced by their 25th version to mark the end of life of the 23rd release next month. Design received new applications like Gnome Books useful for e-books and Calendar to easily manage the schedule.   To enable full support of hotkeys and optimal power management due to the boot scheme bug in Linux kernel, 4.9.0rc4 or above (currently residing in Rawhide nodebug repository at the time of writing) is required and will soon reach availability via update. The case applied to some hybrid...

Since applying fix related to the ACPI from Linux kernel (future 4.8.0) , ASUS kernel laptop runs smoother on Gnome Shell inside Fedora 24 Design Suite. Based on the following observation: The delay of pluggin on/off the power is gone. Without the fix, it took about ten seconds before the system switched the status. Power management has drastically improved.  Closing the lid will automatically suspend the laptop. Multimedia control now works on all applications. Brightness control properly works. For Fedora users having similar issue with X550Z (also F550Z on some countries), a COPR repository is created for that purpose until upstream release the fix version on the kernel. Other distributions can look at the patch and provide feedback for testing and improvement. A big thanks to Peter Wu and Lv Zheng for investigating the issue which turned out bigger than expected: the discovery of new ACPI scheme on some modern laptops .

Following previous topic , testing the build kernel 4.8.0rc4 with the patch related to ACPI EC allow unlocking the functionality of hotkeys. For the first time, ASUS X550ZE has nearly full functionality from keyboard in Linux operating system (Fedora in my case) on par with Microsoft Windows 8.1 and 10.  Hopefully other laptops having similar problem will regain that access. For that learned experience, that bug turned out more complex than expected revealing a different ACPI scheme used in Microsoft Windows 10 and a bad practice from BIOS vendor. It also shows how some vendors ignore standard procedure thus making harder to find the problem. The important lesson is the cooperation between users and developers exchanging knowledge and discovering new elements never seen before. One day, vendors will open themselves approaching the kernel community to improve their products. Now the hotkeys saga comes to the end, the next step is the support of AMD hybrid graphic card. This...

Resuming for the previous topic , with the help of an Arch user and one of kernel maintainers, it turned out the failure of hotkeys functions [Fn] is due to a Linux ACPI bug. Further investigation revealed a bad practice from BIOS vendor and unexpectedly a new challenge in Linux kernel world as quoted: However this report indicates us another gap (except the enumeration order gap): If the namespace EC (DSDT EC in short) is not ready, EC access availability can be kept using the ECDT EC. In Linux, that requres _Qxx control methods to be registered for the ECDT EC. I have never seen a Linux EC driver version doing this before, _Qxx registration is only invoked in acpi_ec_add(). So this bug indicates a gap for Linux. Essentially, what is initially a bug related for non-functional hotkeys for ASUS X550Z laptop revealed a much more deeper issue related Linux ACPI. It is the first time I reached that level of testing in kernel world with the help from upstream kernel. A built kernel...

With the help of an Arch Linux user , we managed to extract input of  hotkeys and closing lid to suspend on several ASUS laptops which required ATKACPI driver to properly function otherwise they will not work despite the availability of asus-nb-wmi module. I made a tracker to alert that discovery so hopefully kernel maintainers will notice.

Stable release of Fedora 23  Design Suite is now available with minimal changes like the inclusion of supplemental wallpapers posted from Nuancier. After installation on ASUS X550ZE laptop , no apparent change of the status is in sight. However, some hotkeys (home,end,pgup,pgdn) are functional. The author of asus-nb-wmi allowing to setup these hotkeys mentioned the inability to reach ASUS developers to address these common issues plaguing many ASUS laptops users and the lack of documentation. Backlight is currently broken due to the controller issues as display on boot so bug is filed : [     7.684288] [drm:radeon_acpi_init [radeon]] *ERROR* Cannot find a backlight controller Battery optimization is still an issue due to the driver choosing to use a powerful GPU rather the power saving mode. AMD is currently working on new driver structure. Dual Radeon is currently unsupported but works are under way .