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

Framework Laptop 13
121

I’m seeing an issue with booting as well across two 11th gen 13" laptops after upgrading to 3.20. It seems likely to be related to the RTC battery. Neither will boot normally, the fans just spin and the power button light comes on with the screen off until it turns all the way off and tries again. One just wouldn’t boot at all until I took out the RTC battery and now it’s normalish, just takes a long time to boot. The other I haven’t tried removing the RTC battery yet, but won’t boot unless I plug it into a phone charger (but not a laptop charger). From reading the docs, it seems this is due to the phone charger trickle charging the RTC battery.

The booting issue happens immediately upon suspending or shutting down. I can close the laptop lid then open it right back up and it won’t come back up unless I power it all the way down. It seems unlikely to be an OS issue, but I’m running Linux.

1 Like
122

Did not work.
Then I could not boot. “No Boot loader found”
EFI Partition is there and directory “debian” with the UEFI Files also.

1 Like
123

If S3’s been unsupported, but I’ve gotten away with using it, and 3.20 breaks it; you figure I should stay on 3.19? I’ve gotten attached to passable power usage during sleep.

What the heck was Intel smoking, anyways? (Aside from their own CPUs, eh?)

124

Not sure what the ‘should’ is. Why would the BIOS reset itself to an older version, it has no idea of what that was, and it is clear in the topic that you can not regress.

125

So how did you dual boot.

Originally I had Ubuntu on an expansion card which made it a USB device to boot from in the menu. Then grub was on the expansion card, so I just set boot to the USB after BIOS updates.

Now I have a prebuild with Windows 11 and installed Ubuntu alongside it, so after BIOS updates which reverts to a clean Windows boot I have to do as mentioned, ensure both are listed in the boot menu and uncheck Windows so it is force to load GRUB.

Have you checked via F12 to see what options you have?

126

Yes that doesn’t seem to be a battery issue

127

Dual boot: First Windows 11 installed then Spirallinux (Debian bin with special configuration like encrypted btrfs in grub)

F12 only Windows is displayed.

I never had a BIOS Update that did somethink like this.

1 Like
128

I did read somewhere about fiddling with GRUB in a round about way but that was again for Ubuntu. If I can find it I update here.

129

Going by comments higher up the thread,

and

it sounds like if I upgrade to 3.20, (a) I will lose the ability to use suspend to RAM and (b) I won’t be able to downgrade to 3.19 to get it back.

I like suspend to RAM, because it’s the only way I can get sleep power consumption down in the vicinity of half a watt, roughly 1% per hour. Suspend to idle sucks. It uses more power and sometimes it fails mysteriously.

So the “should” part of my question is, are there any 3.20 BIOS changes that are desirable enough for me to lose suspend to RAM?

1 Like
130

You first post doesn’t say which OS you are using, does it ?

I have no problems with Win 11. I can (sleep -suspend to RAM) or (hibernate -suspend to SSD) though sleep uses too much battery over a number of hours so I stick to hibernate which takes some 10 plus seconds wait.

131

I’m not having any issues yet, because I haven’t upgraded to 3.20 yet. I’m still running 3.19.

I doubt the OS matters, aside from it being Linux. I’m on Fedora 40. I can’t try 3.20 to see if it works, because downgrading is impossible, so I’m just going by what others have said.

2 Likes
132

Try selecting your bootloader directly with F3 on startup (rather than F12).

Once you’ve booted your preferred OS, re-run the commands you used to install your bootloader. That will rewrite the UEFI NVRAM entries that inform the firmware about it.

133

I would have stuck to 3.19 on my machines if I knew how 3.20 would behave

2 Likes
134

That also means the Release Note is insufficiently accurate as it’s impacting behaviour that’s not mentioned.

1 Like
135

I am having the same exact issue! Even replaced the RTC battery. Everything works if sleep if “s2idle” rather than “deep”.

2 Likes
136

I have an 11gen framework laptop running NixOS (boots from a microSD card). I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to update my BIOS. I currently have 3.19.

The Intel CSME part seems to have successfully worked because the version listed in the BIOS is now 15.0.47.2473. However nothing else got updated.

Whenever it goes to reboot after going through the step from booting from the usb stick with the unzipped BIOS update data, it goes to a screen that says something like “installing update” or something like last, which lasts for a second or two before it immediately reboots after doing nothing at all.

PS I also tried to use fwupdmgr sine the CSME part seems already updated, but that didn’t do anything either.

137

Turns out it was in part due to a faulty usb stick. Running a diff between the original unzipped files and what was on the disk showed a few bytes in Fwupdate.bin were different. Obviously quite bad.

138

Cheap USB drives these days scare me.
Maybe I’ve just had bad luck, but my failure rate’s been very high.

139

In my particular case, the stick is very very old.

141

FWIW, I also had this same problem. I suspect it is due in part to the fact that I’m booting NixOS off of a MicroSD card.

What worked for me, and this is totally unofficial/use at your own risk, was to follow the advice of ryneches and remove the -OD parameter to CapsuleApp, either by editing startup.nsh or by entering the command manually in the shell. This appears to have the effect of installing the Update Capsule (which updates everything other than the CMSE) onto the current bootable USB stick rather than trying to install it onto my boot device. Then, the next time it reboots, it runs the Update Capsule from the USB stick, and updates the BIOS and friends.

I suspect this way is “not recommend”, but it seems better than nothing.

1 Like