For me, it I made one of my dock work by moving my mouse connected over usb dongle from dock onto connecting it using bluetooth directly to laptop.
But even then, when dock was connected I clearly did see multiple pauses in BIOS when it was doing memory testing so it was still degrading in some way on new bios.
Later I started going to office and had the same issue there, so I just downgraded the BIOS…
I’m still contemplating of uninstalling some of firmware update tooling on linux, as it daily nag me to update firmware using notifications…
I tracked the notifications to a firmware-updater snap package. I might have installed it at some point long ago and forgot about it, it was scanning my hardware every 3h and giving me notifications if some firmware was outdated which it did only recently.
Distro: kubuntu 24.04, but most likely it was manually installed. And it’s unrelated to the fwupd package from distro itself.
I was able to successfully upgrade to 3.18 a week or two ago, it solved the random crashes where the entire machine would become unresponsive and I would have to hold the power button to force shutdown, then wait a while, then hold it again to boot it up. However, with 3.18 it can no longer post with my pluggable 7 in 1 hub connected - i have to unplug it then boot. Using Fedora.
snap is notorious in the Linux community, better to remove the snap package. fwupd is the update mechanism that you can use it to install BIOS manually, you can also remove it to prevent the update being inadvertently triggered by said snap package.
It could be forced installed/updated due to snap, you can see how terrible it is
I clearly remember trying to update firmware long ago (and I think it was was already up to date but I didn’t know at that time, so I installed additional tools to helm confirm that all is up-to-date), and I don’t remember uninstalling them. But that’s not important
What is important that with 3.18 I can’t boot laptop when connected dock does have mouse attached into it, which is a PITA, thankfully for me it’s mostly stable on 3.17 (mostly as I did have few random amdgpu freezes, but that probably unrelated)
Well, the “no boot with dock” issue is better than the near daily lockups I was having with 3.17… so perhaps that’s why. But yeah, it should be mentioned in the release notes.
Thanks for the pointer! I started to suspect that despite my laptop still not having the new KEK according to Windows. I ended up resetting the Secure Boot settings back to factory and now it shows the 2023 KEK. Unfortunately it triggered Bitlocker recovery, but after providing the key it looks like I’m back in business and Secure Boot is updated.
Yeah, i have been holding back to this date, because i do need my KVM ( ergo having a USB dock). LEarnt the hardway when i nearly had an CE, when while updating there was no screen and i had to do a hard shut down to escape from the hangup ( even after disconnecting from the KVM). No crashes in my experience to date with the 3.17
Same problem here with my UGREEN Revodok Max 208 (Thunderbolt 4). Was quite worried after the BIOS update why the laptop wouldn’t turn on anymore, but after disconnecting it from the dock, starting it and then reconnecting it, it worked again. Not a big deal for me personally but definitely something to watch out for!
