11th Gen BIOS 3.09 Beta release

Confirmed doesn’t charge with laptop off, luckily I usually power down to hibernate, but better check that as I tend to use it plugged it.

It also may precipitate another problem, will update with info later. :frowning:

I can reproduce the issue of the system not charging when it is off.

It looks like it can be induced by powering the system on, off, then waiting a few seconds and plugging in the charger.

The EC is commanding the charger to charge the battery, but I suspect the the analog reference is not being enabled correctly, so the charger is not actually charging the battery.

We will fix this ASAP and release an updated bios.

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Yeah, my normal workflow has been to power off when I’m not working, and then only put it on the charger as necessary. When I have some more time, I’ll look at how to roll back to 3.07, unless “ASAP” from @Kieran_Levin means “in the next few days.”

If the power is already plugged in and charging proceeding at the time of shutdown, does charging continue after shutdown?

I have another problem that may be related, I have sent an email to support about failing magnetic cables etc. :frowning:

What happens if the laptop goes to 0% battery and goes off? Since won’t be able to charge while powered off, laptop will go to a limbo state/bricked? I think I’ll keep my laptop connected to power until this is fixed.

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Thanks! Will you update the bios, bumping a version as 3.10 or the same new 3.09? If you update as 3.09, can a user who has the current 3.09 upgrade to the new 3.09 by LVFS? I hope you will dump it to 3.10 for us to distinguish issues reported by users.

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@Ricardo Based on my testing, your concern should not be a problem. As if the battery runs out, and power is attached then the system will charge.

I edited my original post, and mentioned that this is recoverable by unplugging AC when the system is off and then plugging it in again after 1 minute, and the system will commence charging again.

Why this recovery method works, is we fully power off the EC and other system power rails 1 minute after the system turns off when on battery, which resets some of the charging logic. So after this you can plug in AC, and the system will charge normally.

So this is pretty easy to recover from, and I do not see any behavior that would prevent the laptop from recovering from not charging.

@junaruga we will release a new version 3.10, so you will be able to update through LVFS, etc.

We are working on a fix for this today, but it will most likely take a few days to do validation, so I would not expect an update until next week.

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All right! Thanks for that. As a future task, if we manage the bios version with “X.YY” (major, minor version), it is easy to run out until 3.99. The “X.YY.ZZ” or “X.YY-beta1” can be the solution.

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So this will only work if the battery is ‘dead’ ??

@amoun the workaround will work at any state of charge.

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Not even sure why minor version is zero-padded 2-digit to begin with…otherwise, we could go for 3.100 and beyond.

@junaruga bios version naming has to follow the SMBIOS bios information spec. Which allows for a major/minor release version of one byte each. We don’t want to break any standards with other versioning schemas. Systems like LVFS use this to determine what version the bios is using, and if it can be updated or now.
See page 31 of.

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So we could go up to 255 then, if needed.

What does the major version of 3 signify though? e.g. Why didn’t we start with 1?

Just tried it. Works and is very cool. Thanks for letting me know.

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Successful update from 3.07 to 3.09 using fwupdmgr on EndeavourOS (arch) based. Machine ran VERY hot during the update itself. It was hot enough as to be uncomfortable to hold from underneath, and so I pointed the desk fan directly into the underside intake ports. This is probably something that should be addressed for future BIOS releases.

As expected, rEFInd bootloader was not available in BIOS boot order selections directly after the update. Using F3 key on a subsequent boot, I was able to navigate to and boot from my refind_x86.efi on my boot partition. Reran refind-install binary and everything was back to normal. The NVRAM erasure thing is an annoyance that I would also like to see addressed, but not a critical show stopper if you are prepared for it.

Secure boot, disk encryption, etc are not in use so nothing to report there.

Just realised this:
Windows → No instruction
Linux → Lengthy detailed instruction

I’m not sure which needs more work.

Test

  • OK running on battery
  • Power down
  • Wait at least a minute
  • Plug in ‘mains’
  • Battery should charge

Result:

  • Battery doesn’t charge until I power up the laptop

Tried four times :frowning:

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Yeah, last night I tried waiting a few minutes before putting it on the charger, and that didn’t help.

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Unfortunately I can confirm what @amoun and @tim300 are reporting.

If I shutdown my i5 11th gen with 3.09 BIOS:

  • While charging, it continues charging after shutdown (slightly fewer amps but still north of 40W drawn from USB-PD source), but

  • With charging not in use at time of shutdown or interrupted after shutdown, normal speed charging will not resume at any point in time when re-inserted, on either side of the laptop

While “not charging”, the orange indicator light does light. However, my USB power meter says either 12V or 20V, but only .02 to .06A (approximately 1W) is drawn from known good USB-PD sources while the laptop is fully shutdown and charging was ever interrupted for ~4 sec or more.

UPDATE: the 1W does end up going into the battery. So it does charge while shutdown, just at 1/40th the speed of normal. Ugh.

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