11th Gen Intel Core BIOS 3.20 Release and Driver Bundle Update

Framework Laptop 13
7

Nice to see updates coming along, but 6E support was advertised all the way back when the laptop was first announced in February 2021. As such I believe it belongs under the “Fixes” section rather than the “Enhancements” section (to me “Enhancements” means new features, however 6E support is an existing feature that was just broken and needed fixing).

Traditionally Wi-Fi has operated in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands with 2.4 GHz having better range and 5 GHz having much better speed (performance to a single device) and capacity (performance accoss all devices in an area).

Massive chunks of the bandwidth in the 5 GHz band are dedicated to other use cases that predated Wi-Fi such as weather radar. Furthermore a lot of the Wi-Fi devices in the 5 GHz band are older devices that make less efficient usage of the bandwidth that they are taking up.

WiFi 6E adds support for a 3rd band known as the 6 GHz band. 6 GHz has slightly worse range than 5 GHz, however it acts as a mostly clean slate that is used exclusively by Wi-Fi 6E and 7 devices that make very efficient use of the bandwidth. This allows 6 GHz to be a massive improvement to speed and capacity compared to 5 GHz.

Without this update a Wi-Fi 6E Wi-Fi card could be used (in fact that is what Framework included with the original DIY edition laptops and all laptops since fhen), however it would be restricted to 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. This update allows 6 GHz to function as expected.

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8

Always good to see another BIOS update.

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9

Tried two times with the linux EFI Updater (checksum was OK), result:

Script Error Status: Security Violation (Line number 11)

:frowning:

I have 3.19 installed. Freshly reseted BIOS.

Any ideas?

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10

That was a huge file 900MB whereas the previous couple were just over 10M

Update edit:
Didn’t notice this was 900Mb Driver updates as well as BIOS 3.20

Still 16min and all done. Seemed even quicker than before. :slight_smile:

Seems I don’t have to reset the Battery Charge Limit or the Power Button Brightness.

Thanks

11

Updates on Windows 11 with no issues.

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12

Are you certain you aren’t comparing the firmware update (10-20 MiB) with the driver bundle? The 11th gen driver bundle has always been over 900MiB. Here’s one from August 2021.
Observe.

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13

Yes my lack of attention to detail

This is a BIOS 3.20 and Driver update.

Thanks for pointing out the difference
:blush:

14

I need some clarity on BIOS 3.20. Is it a Release, or a BETA Release?

The thread’s title is phrased differently from the post’s title. The latter (to me) reads as both the BIOS and the drivers are a singular beta release.

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On the support page, this section:
image

points to this (BIOS 3.19):

But given the non-rollback nature of 3.20, I would think 3.20 is a non-beta Release, one that’s been thoroughly tested internally.

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15

Wonderful to see a BIOS update, thank you!

Sorry if it’s a silly question. I run Windows 11, and WIndows Update shows all drivers up to date, as well as Intel Driver & Support Assistant. Is there any point in installing the driver bundle, or is it for new installs? Would it detect if drivers are already up to date or on newer versions?

16

I imagine that the drivers for the devices you have and are using are fine, but Windows update doesn’t always ‘update’

More likely however is that the driver bundle includes all other drivers that may be of use if you should choose to use any other peripherals, devices or module.

So it may well be unnecessary as you wonder.

Now you have me thinking :slight_smile:

17

Can this be installed on an 11th gen in a CoolerMaster case without a battery?

18

Wanted to provide some steps for those of you that don’t want to update with a usb stick and have an appropriately sized ESP/EFI partition to hold image updates:

I store the images in a directory for the hardware type, eg:

# ls /boot/efi/EFI/Insyde/
CapsuleApp.efi  H2OFFT-Sx64.efi  firmware.cap   startup.nsh
FWUpdLcl.efi    bootx64.efi      hx20.3.20.bin  winux.bin
Fwupdate.bin    error.log        old

I also have created an EFI shell file

% cat /etc/grub.d/31_efi_shell 
#! /bin/sh
# SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+
set -e

[ -d ${pkgdatadir:?} ]
# shellcheck source=/dev/null
. "$pkgdatadir/grub-mkconfig_lib"

echo "Adding efi  shell" >&2
cat << EOF
menuentry 'EFI Shell ' \$menuentry_id_option 'jared' {
EOF
      ${grub_probe:?} --version > /dev/null
      prepare_grub_to_access_device "$(${grub_probe} --target=device /boot/efi/)" | sed -e "s/^/\t/"
cat << EOF
        set root=(hd0,gpt1)
	chainloader /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI
}
EOF

The file that is in /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI comes from the zip file.

For those of you that date back to the DOS days you can see what I did here. You could unpackage things in what will end up FS0:/EFI/BOOT/ as well if you want it to automatically update semi-unattended and you could tell grub to boot thatles next time around.

If you edit the startup.nsh and remove the logo file winux.bin you will get the text based update and be able to see the various components update - I would suggest removing this but i’m also a grumpy old guy who doesn’t load remote images and thinks text/html rendering in e-mail is an abomination :slight_smile:

Thanks @Kieran_Levin

1 Like
19

I would have backup power connected, eg: UPS for the best situation in the event of child, cat or other calamity

20

This looks like it’s failing in the ME update, what is your current ME version? Did the bios update to 3.20 while your ME is left behind to a previous version, eg:
ME.15.0.42.2235.bin
ME.15.0.45.2411.bin

21

What does ME mean and where would I check that? And also: How to solve it? I just followed the instructions and would think that it works OOTB.

22

I solved this by turning off EFI secure boot in the bios prior to starting the upgrade.

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23

Running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a Laptop 13 with 11 gen processor. So far, so good, after upgrade to 3.20.
Looking into getting a new RTC/CMOS battery as I have had some booting problems recently.

24

Thank you Sir, this indeed worked very well. Perhaps this should be reflected in the instruction above. :wink:

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25

(Issue 1) Hum…looks like charging flicker / toggling / flipping is still a thing when, in my case, Stop Charging threshold is set to 72, with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Kernel 6.8.0-31. (When looking at the battery indicator in the GUI, or Settings → Power). While idling.

Side-LED charging indicators stays white though.

In Windows 11, if you hover the mouse cursor over the battery icon in the system tray, I would see the popup tooltip of “Battery status: 72% available (plugged in)” changes to “Battery status: 72% remaining”…and back and forth once in a while (at lease once every 5 minutes of human monitoring period).

(Issue 2) And somewhere along a reboot from Ubuntu 24.04 to Windows 11, the laptop would momentarily continue to charge (ignoring the charge threshold of 72%)…and I see 73% in Windows?

Update (on Issue 1):
And looking at this, I guess it’s because 24.04 LTS currently doesn’t have an OEM kernel? Meaning if I don’t want to see this issue, I need to go back to Ubuntu 22.04?:

Update (on Issue 2):
If I only do Windows–>Reboot–>Windows, I still see the battery charged percentage increase from 72% to 73%.

So, seems like the implementation of the stop charging threshold still has gaps after 2.5 years (since feature release). Hope the BIOS team can look into this.

Both issues are observed with Framework’s 60W charger (and Framework’s USB-C charging cable), and Lenovo’s 65W USB-C charger.

26

Not sure if any of the following is of use to you.

I imagine the way you see the charge in Ubuntu or Windows is different.

Currently I am using my Pi4B

Powering up 1165G7 using Windows 11

The BCL is set to 78% via the BIOS
HWiNFO64 says it’s 78.9% (3 sig figs)
Window states 79% (2 sig figs)

So it looks like the BIOS setting is not quite in line with how the battery status appears via the tools I have to monitor.

It may be worth noting that HWiNFO has varied over the last 10 min from a low of 78.4 to currently 78.6

So if I use 2 sig figs the range is 78 to 79, which is reasonable as no doubt the charge is switching during use but not enough, generally, to switch the charge light from white to amber/red