Tag: ZenBook

Why can’t I get easy hardware

When I bought my Latitude I complained that it seemed to me more and more like a mistake — until the kernel started shipping with the correct (and fixed) drivers, so the things that originally didn’t work right (the SD card reader, the shutdown process, the touchpad, …) started working quite nicely. As of September 2011 (one year and a quarter after I bought it), between Linux and firmware updates from Dell and Broadcom, the laptop worked almost completely — only missing par still is the fingerprint reader, which I really don’t care that much about.

Recently, you probably have seen my UEFI post where I complained that I couldn’t install Sabayon on the new Zenbook (which is where I’m writing from, right now, on Gentoo). Well, that wasn’t the only problem I got with this laptop, and I should really start reporting issues to the kernel itself, but in the mean time let me write down some notes here.

First off, the keyboard backlight is nice and all, but I don’t need it – I learnt to touch-type when I was eight – so it would just be a battery waste of time. While the keys are reported correctly, and upower supports setting the backlight, at least the stable version of KDE doesn’t seem to support the backlight setting. I should ask my KDE friends if they can point me in the right direction. Another interesting point is that while the backlight is turned on at boot, it’s off after suspension — which is probably a bug in the kernel, but it’s working fine for me.

Speaking about things not turning back on after suspension, the WLAN LED on the keyboard is not turning on, at resume. And related to that, the rfkill key doesn’t seem to work that well either. It’s not a big deal but it’s a bit bothersome, especially since I would like to turn off the bluetooth adapter only (and since that’s supposedly hardware-controlled, it should get me some more battery life).

The monitor’s backlight is even more troublesome: first problem is deciding who should be handling it — i’s either the ACPI video driver (by default), the ASUS WMI driver, or the Intel driver — of the three, the only one that make it work is the Intel driver, and I’m not even sure if that’s actually controlling the backlight or just the tint on the screen, even though, when set to zero, it turns the screen OFF, not just display it as black. It does make it bearable though.

The brightness keys on the keyboard don’t work, by the way, nor does the one that should turn on and off the light sensor — the latter, isn’t even recognized as a key by the asus-wmi driver, and I can’t be sure of the correct device ID that I should use to turn on/off said light sensor. After I hacked the driver to not expose either the ACPI or the WMI brightness interfaces, I’m able to set the brightness from KDE at least — but it does not seem to stick, if I take it down, and after some time it starts and gets back to the maximum (when the power is connected, at least).

And finally, there is the matter of the SD card reader. Yesterday I went to use it, and I found out that … it didn’t work. Even though it’s an USB device, it’s not mass-storage — it’s a Realtek USB MMC device, which does not use the standard USB interface for MMC readers at all! After some googling around, I found that Realtek actually released a driver for that, and after some more digging I found out that said driver is currently (3.7) in the staging drivers’ tree as a virtual SCSI driver (with its own MMC stack) — together with a PCI-E peer, which has been already rewritten for the next release (3.8) as three split drivers (a MFD base, a MMC driver, and a MemoryStick driver). I tried looking into working on porting the USB one as well, but it seems to be a lot of work, and Realtek (or rather, Realsil) seems to be already working on it to port it to the real kernel, so it might be worth waiting.

To be fair what dropped away the idea from me of working on the SD card driver is that to have an idea of what’s going on I have to run 3.8 — and at RC1 panics as soon as I re-connect the power cable. So even though I would like to find enough time to work on some kernel code, this is unlikely to happen now. I guess I’ll spend the next three days working on Gentoo bugs, then I have a customer to take care of, so this is just going to be dropped off my list quite quickly.

UEFI booting

Last Friday (Black Friday, since I was in the US this year), I ended up buying for myself an early birthday present; I finally got the ZenBook UX31A that I was looking at since September, after seeing the older model being used by J-B of VLC fame. Today it arrived, and I decided to go the easy route: I already prepared a DVD with Sabayon, and after updating the “BIOS” from Windows (since you never know), I wiped it out and installed the new OS on it. Which couldn’t be booted.

Now before you run around screaming “conspiracy”, I ask you to watch Jo’s video (Jo did you really not have anything with a better capture? My old Nikon P50 had a better iris!) and notice that Secure Boot over there works just fine. Other than that, this “ultrabook” is not using SecureBoot because it’s not certified for Windows 8 anyway.

The problem is not that it requires Secure Boot or anything like that but much more simply, it has no legacy boot. Which is what I’m using on the other laptop (the Latitude E6510), since my first attempt at using EFI for booting failed badly. Anyway this simply meant that I had to figure out how to get this to boot.

What I knew from the previous attempt is this:

  • grub2 supports UEFI both 32- and 64-bit mode, which is good — both my systems run 64-bit EFI anyway;
  • grub2 requires efibootmgr to set up the boot environment;
  • efibootmg requires to have access to the EFI variables, so it requires a kernel with support for EFI variables;
  • but there is no way to access those variables when using legacy boot.

This chicken-and-egg problem is what blown it for me last time — I did try before the kernel added EFI Stub support anyway. So what did I do this time? Well, since Sabayon did not work out of the box I decided to scratch it and I went with good old fashioned Gentoo. And as usual to install it, I started from SysRescueCD — which to this day, as far as I can tell, still does not support booting as EFI either. It’s a good thing then that Asus actually supports legacy boot… from USB drives as well as CDs.

So I boot from SysRescueCD and partition the SSD in three parts: a 200MB, vfat EFI partition; a root-and-everything partition; and a /home partition. Note that I don’t split either /boot or /usr so I’m usually quite easy to please, in the boot process. The EFI partition I mount as /mnt/gentoo/boot/efi and inside it I create a EFI directory (it’s actually case-insensitive but I prefer keeping it uppercase anyway).

Now it’s time to configure and build the kernel — make sure to enable the EFI Stub support. Pre-configure the boot parameters in the kernel, make sure to not use any module for stuff you need during boot. This way you don’t have to care about an initrd at all. Build and install the kernel. Then copy /boot/vmlinuz-* as /boot/efi/EFI/kernel.efi — make sure to give it a .efi suffix otherwise it won’t work — the name you use now is not really important as you’ll only be using it once.

Now you need an EFI shell. The Zenbook requires the shell available somewhere, but I know that at least the device we use at work has some basic support for an internal shell in its firmware. The other Gentoo wiki has a link on where to download the file; just put it in the root of the SysRescueCD USB stick. Then you can select to boot it from the “BIOS” configuration screen, which is what you’ll get after a reboot.

At this point, you just need to execute the kernel stub: FS1:EFIkernel.efi will be enough for it to start. After the boot completed, you’re now in an EFI-capable kernel, booted in EFI mode. And the only thing that you’re left to do is grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/grub/efi. And .. you’re done!

When you reboot, grub2 will start in EFI mode, boot your kernel, and be done with it. Pretty painless, isn’t it?