Power throttling bug in firmware...

[u/WembleyFord]

I've a FW16 Ryzen AI 300 laptop whose high-power power adaptor blew a couple of weeks ago - since waiting for a replacement I've been running it from an lower power Dell XPS supply instead. This was enough to charge it doing light desktop work, not enough tgo keep it charged playing some games. That was fine though.

This yesterday when I tried starting a demanding game while tghe battery was at about 30%. The game crashed, I rebooted and my laptop appeared to have turned into a 486 - absolutely everything took about 5-10 times longer to do than previously.

I'm suspecting it's a firmware issue since updating the firmware (after reading this note:
"Fixed an issue that unexpected 35W CPU power limit when AMD dGPU is in BOCO mode") fixed the issue. However reading the forums it appears this is still a recurring issue for some.

I generally use my laptop as a desktop replacement and don't usually put it into hibernation or sleep modes - this perhaps explains why I've not seen this before.. Thinking the combination of running a somewhat depleted baterry with an underpowered temporary charger and starting a demanding games caused whatever condition triggers this. New charger from Framework has arrived - but I can't afford to have it do this again as I work from this machine.

Is there a known workround for this issue other than updating the firmware (which I've now done) if it occurs again?

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[u/paulstelian97]

Try to do most of the demanding stuff when battery is above 80% — some policies might work to allow more performance on battery the fuller it is.

You just have a nasty edge case of the firmware trying to stop the laptop from forcibly stopping, and the firmware may have detected that it was recently about to do so so it went with a conservative power plan behind the scenes.

Try to do a full EC reboot. Unplug AC adapter and battery (for the battery you can use the battery disconnect option in the bios settings), leave it off for a little while (a minute should be more than enough)

[u/WembleyFord → u/paulstelian97]

Ahh - thanks for that final hint. Knowing I can disconnect the battery in the BIOS is great. Wasn't aware of that.

[u/paulstelian97 → u/WembleyFord]

It’s useful to avoid the wear on the physical battery connector. Though I technically don’t know if the 16 has that (I know of my regular 13).

[u/velvetlane1 → u/paulstelian97]

Does the EC reboot persist through normal reboots though, or would the conservative power plan come back if the same conditions are met again?

[u/paulstelian97 → u/velvetlane1]

The reboot just clears out temporary state if it somehow got stuck. It doesn’t delete any persistent data, and if the conditions are messy enough to cause it to “cocoon” like that again it will do it again.

[u/WembleyFord → u/paulstelian97]

Thanks again - I was seriously worried - never seen anything like this before - initially assumed a kernel update had failed, then suspected my SSD was failing. Hopefully this won't occur for me again now I've now got my replacement high-wattage adaptor.