G73 and asus-wmi linux driver.... I need *your* help

Hello G73 users. I just got my G73SW last week and was pretty frustrated (if not unsurprised) to find that it was not supported in Linux via the asus-laptop kernel module.

I disassembled and examined my ACPI DSDT and found that the G73SW only exposes the hotkeys and other ACPI-related machine specifics (wifi led, keyboard backlight, etc) through the WMI interface. There is rudimentary WMI remapping in the linux kernel, but no clear support for ASUS laptops.

I'm going to write a kernel driver to support the hotkeys and initially I hope to target as many ASUS-WMI enabled G73s as I can.


If you're willing, please go here and download the iasl binary:
ACPICA

From there you can download the file, unzip it, and run a command prompt. cd to the directory of the unzipped iasl.exe and run:
iasl.exe -g

It should produce a few files, I'm mainly interested in DSDT_Notebook.dat and dsdt_notebook.dsl. If you would, zip those up and attach them to the thread. I should only need one dat/dsl file per model, but having a few from the same would never hurt. If you do post one up though, please specify which model you are using.

NOTE: You are at no risk of damaging your laptop by doing this and it will not expose any of your personal information. It is just dumping your ACPI DSDT for me to examine. For more info on ACPI see here. For more info on DSDTs see here. The ACPI4Asus project is here but I am not (yet?) affiliated with them... they are just inspiration.

Thanks, here's to hoping for complete linux support for these bad boys in the near future!
-Nate


(I've attached a zip of the files from my laptop so you know what they look like. This is from a G73SW-A1)

 

I would do this for you but I have a G73JH and I'm 99.9% sure that the JH, JW, and SW have identical ACPI information. I'm 90% sure that the G53, G51, and G71 will also be identical. They all use the ATK package and the ATK for all of them are interchangable. I have an old first generation eePC but it has XUbuntu on it, not windows.

If a dump of a machine extremely similar to yours would be helpful, I can dump ACPI data for a JH?

 

Yup, I would expect the ATK interface exposed through WMI via the DSDT will prove pretty darn similar across G73 models, but it is prudent to make sure.

If you've got the time the data couldn't hurt.

 

Try booting with the acpi_osi=Linux boot parameter. That should expose the acpi hotkeys (hopefully) instead of using wmi.

I had to modify eeepc-wmi.c recently, you might be able to get away with some cheaphax on that. Here's what I did: [all variants] asus 1015pem - Page 2 - Ubuntu Forums

@Jody: the SW must be different, the other models use ACPI by default not WMI.

 

I've been hacking away at the eeepc-wmi driver, actually. Added some printks to see what I could expose, but there is plenty of work to do.

acpi_osi=Linux (or acpi_osi=!Windows 2009) doesn't have an effect on the G73SW.

 

When you acpi_listen there's no difference at all with acpi_osi=Linux on any of the hotkeys? You don't get any events?

 

I will be getting a g53jw here shortly, and i use linux as my main os so I will dump those for you for this model

 

Another thought besides what I previously asked about acpi_listen (still waiting for your answer on that)...

Try toggling EFI/UEFI in the BIOS setup, if you can (previous models have the option). It may change the behavior of the hotkeys.

 

I am currently locked into UEFI mode because I have my disks setup using GPTs and windows booting through UEFI.

I boot into linux under BIOS mode w/ grub2 installed on the GPT partition marked bios_grub. GRUB2/2.6.38-rc3 refuse to boot when loaded via UEFI. Not sure what's going wrong as I have no serial port to get early kernel panic messages from, but I just hang after initrd. :\


Thanks jamezelle. The maintainer of the current asus-laptop and eeepc-wmi kernel drivers has gotten in touch with me and is developing pretty heavily right now. Hopefully in a little while there will be nice WMI-backed hotkey support for general ASUS laptops as that seems to be the sole direction ASUS is heading with the newer models.

 

Are you getting anything from acpi_listen? If you don't even get Fn+F5 and F6, that's a new configuration for ASUS. If you have more details about this, or have posted anywhere else, please post links, since there isn't any mention of this that I can find elsewhere.