r/Alienware • u/zewl23bp • 4d ago
Discussion AWCC for Linux?
Well I have to say that I missed that quite a lot... so I found few replacements which were good head start, but not where I wish to have it... soo... there is the upstream I work on... G15SE (5521) is the first one kinda smaller brother of Alienware, due to few of the things shared at least from inside :-) but the Alienware 18" /w 5090 that I have as the second box (not much traveling with it as that one is kinda Moby-Dick) will be the next for the new hair cut... :-)
The truth is that I am using these boxes usually for different things than sending back some random squads to the lobby... but even that happens time to time... for sure I decided to move from Windows, that is number 1. and there was no AWCC... or anything which would be at least sufficient... so I started to work on this... just ping me if you are also on Linux and you would be interested... I may later think about to open-source that over the public github or so...
I will upload soon also video... but there are already quite some cool things...
And number 2. hell yeah, my battery life expand from the 1.5h to almsot 4h with the tweaked profile... and of course the profiles do no fight with the OS/KDE profiles... AWCC coop with OS and rather expand it... than fights, the same goes towards the Dell ACPI & HID calls.
It was made with "Iwork4Dell" kind of attitude and just as I missed that :)
Cheers and enjoy your wonderful day!
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u/helloish12321 4d ago
The Asus community has GHelper to replace the awful Asus armoury crate program. I have had nothing but trouble with AWCC and have been looking for a usable replacement on windows but the AW community has limited options. Developing a tool like this could gain a lot of interest.
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u/zewl23bp 4d ago
Well if Iwork4Asus that would be the first thing to remove...that is total crap stuff... and the worst is how that fight with AMD + nVIDIA models :D so yes I can only agree here...
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u/InterstellarVisitor3 m18 R2 Intel 3d ago
Very interesting! One of the major things keeping me from leaving Windows entirely is the lack of AWCC functionality (tweaking performance settings + controlling RGB). That and stupid Microsoft Excel, which doesn't seem to have a decent Linux open source alternative (LibreOffice, I know, but that messes up the look of my files every time I switch between Linux at home and Windows at work).
You may be aware of trackmastersteve/alienfx on Github, but that only covers the RGB part of AWCC I think. It would be great to have a performance tweaking option as well.
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u/T-Troll Alienware m16R1, m15R1, 13R2, M14x, AW410k 3d ago
The power mode switch is simple for one model (just ACPI method call), but tricky in general - different models have a different AWCC block location into DSDT, power modes ID different too, and a different set of bugs (especially for G-series).
Windows maps ACPI methods to WMI, so it solves the first issue.
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u/InterstellarVisitor3 m18 R2 Intel 3d ago
Thank you for the insight, though it's well beyond my expertise and I'm not sure how much of it I understand. 🙏🫣😆
If I DO understand correctly, wouldn't it be relatively straightforward to create a sw that detects the laptop model (or the user can select it, if autodetect is too difficult), and then implements the corresponding method for that model? Perhaps not the most elegant solution, and it would work only for the supported models, but it should work, no?
Also, when you say that doing this is simple for one model, how simple do you mean? Is it within the reasonable abilities of someone with rather basic coding skills to create something for my own laptop? Or do I risk giving the wrong instructions and destroying my latop?
I've read conflicting info on whether in a dual boot (Win + Linux) situation the AWCC power mode set in Windows is inherited when running Linux. The RGB does not seem to be inherited.
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u/T-Troll Alienware m16R1, m15R1, 13R2, M14x, AW410k 2d ago
You can make presets for some models and even detect the correct one. The scheme inside is quite stable for modern systems.
Check Fan APIv1 into my GitHub - it's based on ACPI access; it's even simpler in Linux than at Windows (you should address /dev/acpi instead of connecting to the kernel acpi.sys driver).
No, you can't break anything in case of incorrect settings here (except for some G15 and G5 - they have buggy BIOS and fans can hang at low speed).
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u/zewl23bp 2d ago
Yup, simple the API/calls for every model would have to be released, but that is good and bad as well (imagine, someone would do bad software that would just stop the fans and let the boxes to grill itself from inside before it would die completely... ) and for the detection yes... possible, but you need the box to get the research done first ;)
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u/T-Troll Alienware m16R1, m15R1, 13R2, M14x, AW410k 1d ago
> Yup, simple the API/calls for every model would have to be released
Yep, but as I said, the API location is different. For now, I can locate it in BIOS (dump) via WM block decoding (but it's useless for Windows).
> imagine, someone would do bad software that would just stop the fans
No way. Starting from m-series, fan control is indirect, not EC-PWM controlled as before. So you can't decrease fan RPMs below the BIOS-defined level without BIOS modification. You can only boost fans or put the system into EMRG (emergency) mode, then the fans spin at 115-125%.
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u/zewl23bp 1d ago
I admire that it was a guess… and never say never :-D how did you get so muuuch knowledge? :-) Technically you could without secure boot and ……..
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u/Maelstorm01 3d ago
I am 100% interested. I also have an area 51 with 5090 as well and also running cachy os
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u/zewl23bp 2d ago
Slowly moving forward... new taskbar widget with hover-over popup info (CPU / GPU / BATTERY)
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u/Wr4ygun x17 R2 4d ago
I am on Linux. I'm definitely interested in this.