X210/X2100 embedded controller fixes (was: X210 EC datasheet/better brightness control)

[flyingfishfinger]

Opening this can of worms back up - the EC fixes so far are pretty impressive, but there are still some troublesome issues with this machine.

In particular, I'd like to try and figure out USB-C charging properly, I'm sure people have noticed the charge / not charging cycling with smaller chargers even with the "slow charge" EC blob.

I've done a few experiments with a USB-C power meter and figured out that in general, the input power (with no battery) agrees with the PL1/PL2 settings plus about 5W. However, that means there's some other issue with charging or the current limit set in the EC. For example, I connected a 65W charger with the "slow" EC binary, set the PL1/PL2 to 5W /10! (!) and found that during the "charge" part of the cycle, input power was no higher than ~ 17W and we are nowhere NEAR the charger limit.

This tells me (a) maybe there's an issue with total available power negotiation or (b) the EC charge setting somehow doesn't do what we think.

Anyone interested in helping to work this out? I'd love to use a small GAN charger for this machine...

R

[dmdsoftware]

Do you need to patch the BIOS to get working EFI on the X210? I noticed today that the BIOS reports UEFI 2.x but I've tried to boot off both USB drives and hard drives that have a EFI partition -- both do not boot either presenting a black screen or an error "enter a proper boot device". Only boots of legacy drives. If I go into the BIOS while an EFI drive is attached, if I go to "start efi..." it says it can't find shell.efi on any drive.

Also, does anyone use their X210 with modern linux? The last time I used this device was back when Debian 9.3 was current (kernel 4.19). Standby and hibernation worked perfect -- tested again today. But with Debian 12, hibernation fails to resume stating the hibernation image is not of the correct architecture type. I tried kernel 6.3, 6.1, 5.18 and even a LTS 4.19 being 4.19 was working with hibernation in Debian 9.

[L29Ah]

Do you need to patch the BIOS to get working EFI on the X210? I noticed today that the BIOS reports UEFI 2.x but I've tried to boot off both USB drives and hard drives that have a EFI partition -- both do not boot either presenting a black screen or an error "enter a proper boot device". Only boots of legacy drives. If I go into the BIOS while an EFI drive is attached, if I go to "start efi..." it says it can't find shell.efi on any drive.

Also, does anyone use their X210 with modern linux? The last time I used this device was back when Debian 9.3 was current (kernel 4.19). Standby and hibernation worked perfect -- tested again today. But with Debian 12, hibernation fails to resume stating the hibernation image is not of the correct architecture type. I tried kernel 6.3, 6.1, 5.18 and even a LTS 4.19 being 4.19 was working with hibernation in Debian 9.

I run my EFI Gentoo Lignux (in fact GRUB) through the stock BIOS with disabled CSM.
6.5.0 here, both s2ram and s2disk work well.

[dmdsoftware]

Do you need to patch the BIOS to get working EFI on the X210? I noticed today that the BIOS reports UEFI 2.x but I've tried to boot off both USB drives and hard drives that have a EFI partition -- both do not boot either presenting a black screen or an error "enter a proper boot device". Only boots of legacy drives. If I go into the BIOS while an EFI drive is attached, if I go to "start efi..." it says it can't find shell.efi on any drive.

Also, does anyone use their X210 with modern linux? The last time I used this device was back when Debian 9.3 was current (kernel 4.19). Standby and hibernation worked perfect -- tested again today. But with Debian 12, hibernation fails to resume stating the hibernation image is not of the correct architecture type. I tried kernel 6.3, 6.1, 5.18 and even a LTS 4.19 being 4.19 was working with hibernation in Debian 9.

I run my EFI Gentoo Lignux (in fact GRUB) through the stock BIOS with disabled CSM.
6.5.0 here, both s2ram and s2disk work well.

Maybe I have a bad machine. Even standard Debian 12 live USB ISO that uses EFI won't boot, and a HD with EFI won't booth. Either boots on every other machine I've tried, even on macs.

This CSM is a BIOS setting?

[L29Ah]

This CSM is a BIOS setting?

Yes.

[dmdsoftware]

I run my EFI Gentoo Lignux (in fact GRUB) through the stock BIOS with disabled CSM.
6.5.0 here, both s2ram and s2disk work well.

Maybe I have a bad machine. Even standard Debian 12 live USB ISO that uses EFI won't boot, and a HD with EFI won't booth. Either boots on every other machine I've tried, even on macs.

This CSM is a BIOS setting?

I compared my Debian 12 install with the Debian 9 install and I realized, since moving to Wayland in the past year, I've got accustom to starting hibernation via "systemctl hibernation". For decades prior when I was using xorg, I was calling /usr/sbin/hibernate to hibernate. When I tried this on this machine with Debian 12 w/ Wayland, it's working -- I'm able to hibernate and resume. I think I simply got accustom to invoking hibernation using systemctl as it was the only method available on Fedora with Wayland, and since it was working without issue on all my other machines with either distro, I simply forgot about the other method.

Its working again, so all is well.