Optimus V (bios) problems

ashh87

Member
Hi,

I've got an Optimus V (W350STQ) and I've seen that there have been problems with the fan, seemingly cause by the bios. First of all, I'm running bios 1.0.0.9 and EC 1.0.0.3 and I occasionally get the fans going 100% for an hour or so. I'd like to see that fixed, but I will see how the other thread develops.

I also have some other problems, perhaps also with the bios, and I wonder if anybody can help - I'd like to know if my issues are real issues and not just Linux bugs! If we find these are genuine bios problems, will Clevo fix them with some badgering from pcspecialist?

1) I cannot change the Advanced settings in the bios. If I go into that menu, it shows an option for bluetooth which I cannot select. I can exit that section and there are no other options, where I might have expected, for example, controls for virtualisation. This brings me to 2)...

2) On booting, I get an error message - "Your BIOS is broken; DMAR reported at address 0!" This is related to virtualisation and from what I can gather, pops up when the DMAR table is genuinely broken or when virtualisation is disabled in the bios. But as I said in 1), I can't check or change this.

So, can people on Windows run a virtual machine? I might try installing an old version of MS Virtual PC which won't work without VT-d and see if it works, in order to find out if it is enabled or not. Does anybody have any experience running a VM on this machine that can help? My first attempts at running W7 under kvm result in the W7 setup telling me it couldn't configure something, which is unusual. Related?

3) Graphics driver errors - this could be a problem with the open source nvidia drivers, I don't know. What's interesting is that I can't find this error for non Clevo machines. If you look at http://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/problems/1130416/ (click on the 175743 tab), there is the same crash as I have had, but on the W230ST (13" Optimus). I get the same error message. Above it, I get some more messages, including:

nouveau E[ VBIOS][0000:01:00.0] 0x8955[0]: unknown opcode 0xaa
...
nouveau E[ PBUS][0000:01:00.0] MMIO read of 0x00000000 FAULT at 0x10f20c [ IBUS ]
...
nouveau E[ PBUS][0000:01:00.0] MMIO read of 0x00000000 FAULT at 0x17e8dc [ IBUS ]
...
mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,10000000 old: write-back new: write-combining
...
nouveau E[ DRM] Pointer to TMDS table invalid

Maybe this is all irrelevant, however, as I can't find other references to this, perhaps it's something to do with the Clevo bios. It would be interesting to see if this goes away if the DMAR error goes away.

4) Brightness control problems - probably a Linux driver problem, but may be related to the above problems with the graphics drivers. The OS settings brightness control has no effect on the screen brightness. It does seem to change the brightness number though - the hotkeys on-screen indicator setting follows the OS setting. In fact, using the OS setting seems to be the only way to turn this value back up - the hotkeys will lower it, but not raise it. I've seen other threads about a W7 hotkey fix, so maybe something similar can be done for Linux.

Finally, it would be interesting to know how these problems interact with the fan issue. I guess the GTX765m interacts with the fans via a temperature sensor somehow, but if communication is broken in some way, as suggested by the graphics driver errors above, perhaps this might cause erratic fan behaviour.
 
not sure about most of your problems but the hotkey/brightness problem can be sorted with a bios update avalaible from PCS. I just emailed them and they send it out on a USB with install instructions, I've just done it and can now control screen brightness fine.
 

ashh87

Member
Thanks, that makes sense!

For point 2) above, I have used the Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) to confirm that the base address of the DMAR DRHD subtable is 0, which apparently is wrong - it should point somewhere else. I've also used the instructions at the bottom of http://askubuntu.com/questions/103965/how-to-determine-if-cpu-vt-extensions-enabled-in-bios using rdmsr to determine that VT is enabled (returns 5). I'll contact PCS and ask them to ask Clevo about this. Disabling iommu allows me to get a VM running too.

I'm also getting:

[Firmware Bug]: ACPI(PEGP) defines _DOD but not _DOS
 

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Who did you email? I emailed them about the fan problem and was told there was nothing, yet keep reading about people with a fix. Gah!

This brightness problem. Is it the thing about the brightness changing itself (top left of screen gets a brightness icon thingy), or is it something else?

Thanks.
 

ashh87

Member
I emailed enquiries and mentioned Jack, who I think is dealing with the fan issue. My brightness doesn't change itself, it won't change when I press the buttons which should change it! tonybaby123 says this is fixed with a bios update though. I'm not sure if I want to get that update just yet as my fan doesn't seem as bad as everybody elses, so I don't want changing whatever fan controls to adversely affect my machine. I couldn't quite tell if this fix was a hack, or if the fan tables are actually truly wrong.
 

ashh87

Member
Following up:

PCSpecialist sent me a new BIOS, which fixed many things. I'm now on BIOS 1.00.14 and EC 1.00.08. For a start, the fans don't seem so bad, which is nice. To deal with each of my previous points:

1.) Not that much of a problem now because....

2.) is fixed, so I don't need to check if virtualisation is enabled (which it is).

3.) Not fixed, but there are problems with nouveau anyway, as graphics vendors are... not very good... with linux drivers. Unsure about the TMDS table issue though, that may still be firmware issue, but I might not know for a long time as there are plenty of bugs to hunt down before making a decision that it is.

4.) Fixed. Also, "[Firmware Bug]: ACPI(PEGP) defines _DOD but not _DOS" is related to brightness, and not a problem according to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Debugging/Backlight
 
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