frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Asus Gaming Laptop ACPI Firmware Bug: A Deep Technical Investigation

https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
64•signa11•2h ago

Comments

dlcarrier•1h ago
One laptop model with buggy ACPI down, 5,387 to go.
orbital-decay•1h ago
It says it affects all ASUS laptops since 2021, making them stutter at the most basic tasks.

Which I'm ready to believe, knowing the state of most laptops... but this entire thing is pretty clearly generated by Gemini with its over-the-top dramatic style, which was unable to handle the article of this size and started looping over. Not sure I should believe any of it, or at least be sure that it didn't mess up the specifics.

nitinreddy88•1h ago
Out of curiosity, why not release BIOS mod with a fix? Atleast personal laptops (out of warranty) can benefit out of it until Asus fixes their sht.

People blame Windows being slow and etc but most of the times hardware manufactures don't even get into this level to make best out of thier hardware. This is the reason why Apple is so successful, they control hardware, software while in open world, software like Linux/Windows is written by someone while hardware is designed by someone else.

kaladin-jasnah•1h ago
Perhaps there is firmware signing.
worthless-trash•33m ago
I dont think it even needs a bios mod, i think you could get away with updating the acpi tables ( See https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/acpi/initrd_table_overri... )
Panzer04•1h ago
No wonder people end up pushing macs.

It's unbelievable that something this bad has been shipping for four years. I guess I know what I'm not buying, at least...

jsiepkes•42m ago
Apple also had issues like these. For example this one where it also first denied the issue: https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/24/efi-firmware/?utm_source=perp...
SchemaLoad•37m ago
Reminds me of when MSI laptops were getting properly bricked after users ran `rm -rf /` because of a UEFI bug where the board could not boot after some variables got deleted https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
pjmlp•13m ago
They have their own issues as well, for those of us outside the distortion field.
taurath•1h ago
I have one of these, a Zephyrus G15. That it had an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU should have been a red flag that support would be really poor. Only a year out of warranty, it is a brick on a shelf because the thermals are so atrocious it pretty much burned itself out, and even with a thorough new application of thermal paste through a multi hour process there just isn't any way to get it to perform within spec. Supposedly, if you RMA it through ASUS they will charge you something like $700 and be unlikely to fix it. They have an insane dud rate, and even when it does work the hardware is barely hanging on. Several acquaintances have had similar problems.

It drastically reduced my perception of Asus as a brand - I wanted something I could game with, it promised the moon of portability and performance but they couldn't pull it off.

frnx•45m ago
I have an older ASUS laptop from 2015 which also has (more minor than this!) ACPI state management bugs. I initially bought that machine because it was a pretty high-end and was somewhat disappointed about both the build quality and the firmware/software support.
kingstnap•25m ago
Somehow laptop makers all write complete garbage firmware.

I'm sure dell does the same terrible handling of DGPU power and badly written ISRs that pointless raise system latency. I had shoddy crashes for months that would cause my dell laptop to BSOD and burn up in my backpack because the DGPU got stuck on I a loop during some ridiculous windows modern standby wakeup.

worthless-trash•36m ago
I hacked the ACPI firmware on my system, linux is able to apply "my firmware" rather than use the operating system supplied firmware.

Does anyone know if windows can do the same ?

M95D•34m ago
... and people are looking forward to signed UEFI and ACPI on ARM systems too. How do they expect an ACPI written in a chinese sweatshop will work if Asus quality is this low?
SchemaLoad•6m ago
I assume all of these gaming laptops are largely developed by outsourced sweatshops today so I don't imagine much difference.
taneq•24m ago
I have a 2024 Zephyrus G14 and it has bursts of stuttering which seem to be directly linked to running off USB-C power. It doesn't do it on the original power brick, but on a 70W USB power brick, it slows down massively every now and then, to the point where the mouse cursor is only updating every few seconds and any playing audio starts underrunning buffers. Unplugging USB power immediately clears the issue up for a while. It's fine running off battery, and it's fine when I plug USB power back in, even straight away.

It does other stupid things with power management, too:

- There seems to be some "cooldown" logic that keeps it awake with the fan running for a while (sometimes minutes) after closing the lid. If I just unplug the laptop stick it straight in a backpack, it'll keep doing this (getting hotter and hotter, and burning half of the battery capacity) until it hits the critical high temp shutdown. It's great fun taking it out at the start of a plane flight and finding out it's on low battery and has bbq'd itself.

- Even if I do wait for the fan to turn off before stashing the laptop, when I open the lid and wake it up, it immediately goes into hibernate mode, and I have to wait for it to finish hibernating, turn it back on, and wait for it to boot up, which is really frustrating.

The solution to both of these (for me) is to reassign the power button to be 'hibernate' instead of 'sleep', and to explicitly hibernate it every time I'm packing it up. It's still stupid and annoying, and a damn shame because it's otherwise a really nice laptop. The OLED screen is beautiful and the build quality feels great. I just wish it wasn't crippled.

Animats•22m ago
Short version: don't buy ASUS gaming laptops until this is definiteively fixed, and if you one under warranty, file a warranty claim, being prepared to go to Small Claims Court.
fulafel•19m ago
Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently they didn't get a show stopping rate of product returns.

A quote from one of the linked reddit threads. I wonder if the warranty trip is part of their scheme.

"I did everything you suggested , but nothing changed. I send it back via garante. I am curious what they do whit it."

"what was it at the end? did they respond?"

"They have claimed that the plato works perfectly. So basically i just got use to it. I am using bluetooth earbuds all the time so i cant notice the problems."

pjmlp•14m ago
That is what happens when the industry has spent decades educating users that is normal computers are broken.

In any other industry everyone would be returning their acquisitions day one.

About 35 years ago, I had a teacher asserting computers are like buying shoes that randomly explode when tying them.

Thankfully consumer laws are finally happening.

SchemaLoad•8m ago
Windows laptop users are just conditioned to the fact that they don't work properly and just deal with the issues.
brian-armstrong•13m ago
Excellent sleuthing. I feel like this has some great quick debugging ideas for system wonkiness that I never knew existed.

It feels a bit of a shame to wrap it all up in an AI-written summary, but I guess if that was the only way to get the info out, so be it.

The Ruliology of Lambdas

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/09/the-ruliology-of-lambdas/
1•nsoonhui•4m ago•0 comments

In Praise of Idleness (1932)

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
1•awanderingmind•9m ago•0 comments

Detect If Content Is AI Generated

https://www.detect-ai.me/
2•detectmeai•16m ago•0 comments

A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment
1•aratahikaru5•19m ago•0 comments

Pnpm 10.16's delayed dependency updates

https://pnpm.io/blog/releases/10.16
1•nnx•19m ago•0 comments

Launching: The Boring Semantic Layer

https://juhache.substack.com/p/the-boring-semantic-layer
1•adwmayer•26m ago•0 comments

HackTerms: Crowdsourced Dictionary of Coding Terms

https://www.hackterms.com/
1•AbuAssar•26m ago•0 comments

Causal AI

https://www.hopit.ai/stories?slug=causality-in-ml-2025-09-17-ec752
1•Arkid•27m ago•0 comments

Flaggy package updated for first time since 2022 because of AI

https://github.com/integrii/flaggy/releases/tag/v1.6.0
1•integrii•28m ago•1 comments

History of Semiconductor Industry

https://www.hopit.ai/stories?slug=httpswwwtechtargetcomwhatisfeaturethe-history-of-semiconductors...
1•Arkid•31m ago•0 comments

Slavery After Abolition: Revolt on the Amelia

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/slavery-after-abolition-revolt-amelia
1•samclemens•34m ago•0 comments

TypeScript Tuple Lenth Tricks

https://rena.to/blog/17-typescript-tuple-length
1•renatorib•35m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: There are other people on HN with other professions besides programmers?

1•whyandgrowth•35m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Looking to Hire Skilled Developers from China?

2•zhyd1997_•38m ago•0 comments

[ARC-AGI-2 SoTA] Efficient Evolutionary Program Synthesis

https://ctpang.substack.com/p/arc-agi-2-sota-efficient-evolutionary
1•frozenseven•39m ago•1 comments

Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Transition Has Uncovered Performance Shortcomings

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Perf
2•thangqt•40m ago•0 comments

Firefox 143.0

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/143.0/releasenotes/
1•pentagrama•45m ago•0 comments

Biometric border control: Germany to launch entry/exit system in October

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Biometric-border-control-Germany-to-launch-entry-exit-system-in-Octo...
2•huijzer•46m ago•0 comments

Solving a Wooden Puzzle Using Haskell

https://glocq.github.io/en/blog/20250428/
1•Bogdanp•51m ago•0 comments

Lunar Regolith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_regolith
2•pinkmuffinere•52m ago•0 comments

Hypervisor from Scratch

https://github.com/SinaKarvandi/Hypervisor-From-Scratch
2•pykello•53m ago•0 comments

U.S. states are shedding shareholder protections. That's an advantage for Canada

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-us-states-shedding-shareholder-protec...
1•petethomas•55m ago•0 comments

Set (Card Game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(card_game)
3•rickcarlino•56m ago•0 comments

Positive emotional bias could be a sign of cognitive decline in the aging

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-positive-emotional-bias-early-cognitive.html
2•PaulHoule•58m ago•0 comments

You Are Inevitably Performative

https://rishigurjar.com/blog/inevitable-performativeness
2•rishigurjar•1h ago•0 comments

Notion API importer, with Databases to Bases conversion bounty

https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-importer/issues/421
26•twapi•1h ago•0 comments

Consumer Reports calls on Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/consumer-reports-calls-on-microsoft-to-extend-suppo...
4•giardini•1h ago•0 comments

NativeLaunch – Expo/React Native Starter Template with Supabase, CI/CD

https://nativelaunch.dev
1•jonypopovv•1h ago•1 comments

Goodnight Moon

https://lookingatpicturebooks.substack.com/p/goodnight-moon
1•duck•1h ago•0 comments

With Strings Attached

https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2025/10/with-strings-attached-review-a-cultural-history-of-the-v...
1•tintinnabula•1h ago•0 comments