I uncovered an ACPI bug in my Dell Inspiron 5567. It was plaguing me for 8 years
13 comments
·September 18, 2025rmu09
I remember needing a patch to the DSDT on a Dell latitude x300 for linux to work proberly (~20 years ago?). It was attached to the initrd. IIRC one problem was that the microsoft ACPI table compiler produced code that was illegal under some interpretation of the standard, and the intel tools on linux didn't like that.
altairprime
The process for shipping a kernel workaround seems to be documented here, for those motivated to patch these ACPI bugs:
CamouflagedKiwi
Wow that takes me back - I went through that maybe 15 years ago to fix something about my laptop at the time. Fortunately haven't needed to since - I assumed that either laptop manufacturers got better at doing this stuff right, or (maybe more likely) Linux got better at interpreting their bugs.
ggm
Move one instruction from above to below the IF?
rgreekguy
Someone share this with Apple, they have the same bug.
scrubs
I do wonder ... I run ubuntu ocular t2 on a macpro '16... everytime I accidentally close the lid the laptop becomes unresponsive. I have to cycle power which usually then needs a manual fsck before it can boot normally.
achandlerwhite
In my experience Apple devices are the only ones that get sleep right.
kosolam
I had tons of wierd boot/reboot issues with my old dell precision m4800. It stuck before boot and required voodoo rituals to finally boot successfully into linux or windows. Now it wasn’t used for some years and having installed recently a modern linux it works just fine now, like never before. As if the computer finally fixed itself.
db48x
More likely your updated Linux kernel checks for those specific bugs in those specific ACPI tables. If it finds them, it tells the kernel to ignore them and replace them with driver code. And then they actually bothered to test the driver code and make sure that it actually works.
avhception
Maybe newer kernels patch the DSDT, like discussed in the comments of the blog post.
aetherspawn
Toshiba Satellite had an infuriating ACPI bug that prevented Linux from reading the battery percentage!
null
See recently: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
I get the impression that, in hardware companies, software is often not taken very seriously, when it can cripple the user experience for trivial bugs. It's also annoying that it's "proprietary" rather than open source, when hundreds of models will be using the same chipset in the same way. It's not a competitive advantage, the sleep code, it can only be a disadvantage if it's done badly.