"High Performance" profile failing on MSI Prestige 15 A10SC

[dsvarela]

Setup:

Distro: Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon 26.04
Desktop: KDE Plasma 6.6
Laptop Model: MSI Prestige 15 A10SC

What's happening:

On a fresh boot: When starting up, /sys/devices/platform/msi-ec/shift_mode returns unspecified. If you click "High Performance" right away, the button visually stays clicked in the UI, but absolutely nothing is written to the hardware.
After picking another mode: If you click a working profile (like Balanced), it successfully writes to the file and locks in a valid state. If you try clicking "High Performance" after doing that, the button just snaps right back and refuses to activate.

I think this has to do with the code trying to write "turbo" to shift_mode instead of "sport".

I should note other buttons work as intended, and this might be model dependent, since I'm running a laptop with shift_mode instead of user_mode, and turbo is not an available option in the available_shift_modes (only eco, comfort and sport).

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

[mutchiko]

@dsvarela good debugging skills, let me just clarify a few things:

shift_mode and user_mode are the same, just the names between MCC and msi-ec that change:

ECO: super battery
COMFORT: silent (can be balanced but with AUTO fan mode instead of silent on newer models after ~2021)
SPORT: balanced on some older models
TURBO: high performance

For some reason, msi-ec doesn't expose TURBO specifically for your model (and another similar one), which is why the UI refuses to actually enable high performance. and there is a good chance that it was a mistake.

To help accelerate things, i need you to provide an EC dump when /sys/devices/platform/msi-ec/shift_mode return unspecified or unknown

[dsvarela]

Thank you for the quick reply!

Here is the EC Dump:

|      | _0 _1 _2 _3 _4 _5 _6 _7 _8 _9 _a _b _c _d _e _f
|------+------------------------------------------------
| 0x0_ | 00 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
| 0x1_ | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
| 0x2_ | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20 80 e0 06 49 0b  |..............I.|
| 0x3_ | 03 01 01 05 51 0a 05 00 a0 14 60 3b 71 02 c0 00  |....Q.....`;q...|
| 0x4_ | 18 15 50 00 19 0d 00 00 74 0a ce 3c ca 0b f8 43  |..P.....t..<...C|
| 0x5_ | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
| 0x6_ | 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 3d 00 32 3a 41 46 5a 5f  |........=.2:AFZ_|
| 0x7_ | 64 41 2d 3a 41 48 50 55 64 00 03 05 05 05 05 03  |dA-:AHPUd.......|
| 0x8_ | 32 00 32 3c 46 52 5a 5d 64 32 2d 32 41 48 50 55  |2.2<FRZ]d2-2AHPU|
| 0x9_ | 64 00 03 05 05 06 03 03 02 00 6e 02 00 66 00 00  |d.........n..f..|
| 0xa_ | 31 36 53 33 45 4d 53 31 2e 31 30 33 31 31 30 37  |16S3EMS1.1031107|
| 0xb_ | 32 30 31 39 31 37 3a 30 34 3a 33 30 19 0d 40 00  |201917:04:30..@.|
| 0xc_ | 00 01 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 77 00 91 00 00 14 00  |..%......w......|
| 0xd_ | 00 00 00 00 70 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 1a 03 1d  |....p...........|
| 0xe_ | e2 02 00 03 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 d1 00 d0  |................|
| 0xf_ | 00 00 80 82 0d 00 05 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|

I ran cat /sys/devices/platform/msi-ec/shift_mode before and after to make sure the status stayed as unspecified.

For my setup specifically, the mode changes (the one's I have access to) are currently writing the following:
Super Battery -> eco
Silent -> comfort
Balance -> comfort

Let me know if there is anything else I can help with!

[mutchiko]

Thanks for the ec dump, i can currently recommend you to either wait for a fix in msi-ec, or try the fix yourself:

Uninstall the current msi-ec module

Add this after line 88:

{ SM_TURBO_NAME,   0xc4 },

Install using the regular DKMS method

Reboot

Now high performance mode should work normally in MCC, you can also try stress testing in different modes if you want

[dsvarela]

I appreciate the response! In the meantime, I notice that I can manually write "sport" to cat /sys/devices/platform/msi-ec/shift_mode.
So I have hacked together a version of MControlCenter that very basically overwrites the Turbo instances with Sport instances. So the GUI is now writing sport correctly to cat /sys/devices/platform/msi-ec/shift_mode :)

I think this hack will only work for me specifically, hence why I hadn't mentioned it earlier.

Should I also open an issue about this in the mci-ec repo?

[mutchiko]

Should I also open an issue about this in the mci-ec repo?

I already passed the message the moment you opened your issue here. but if you want, you can go ahead and open a new issue there, just make sure there aren't previous issues about your problem, else you can just write to these older issues.

Also don't forget to link to this issue, it'll make things easier.

[hugoplanell]

I'm also affected by this issue (I've mentioned here some time ago #255). Thanks for clarifying what to do, I will do it for my model :)