ASUS Vivobook S 15 S5504VN on Fedora Linux

S5504VN.md

ASUS Vivobook S 15 S5504VN on Fedora Linux

Specs:

• CPU: i5-13500H
• GPU: Intel Arc A350M 4GB
• Battery: 70Wh
• BIOS: Latest (v301 from 2023)
• OS: Fedora 42

Everything works as far as I'm aware. I've not tried the fingerprint sensor. The following is a (technical, sorry) guide to optimize battery life.

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Battery

The battery life was quite poor by default. At idle and minimum brightness, my laptop was using 22W which equated to only around 3 hours doing nothing. I was able to improve this to 3W at idle, theoretically equating to almost 24 hours instead of 3.

The CPU is limited to 15W on battery and 45W on charge. I find these to be sensible defaults so I left them as-is.

But the GPU is a problem. The dedicated graphics card requires 9W at idle just to stay online, which is insane.

Measuring power draw

Close all apps, disconnect your charger, and run the following in a terminal to setup powertop.

sudo dnf install powertop
sudo powertop --calibrate # (optional, takes around 15 minutes, will turn off your screen a few times)

After installing, run sudo powertop to read your power draw e.g.

The battery reports a discharge rate of 22.68 W

Disabling the dGPU

Since the Arc dGPU takes a lot of power and isn't that much faster than the integrated Xe graphics, I just disabled it. On some laptops, you can use supergfxctl --mode integrated (see next section for setup) but it didn't work for me so I had to replace the driver....

First find the id of your Arc GPU. Mine is 04:00.0:

$ lspci -nnk | grep -E "Arc|DG2" -A2
04:00.0 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation DG2 [Arc A350M] [8086:5694] (rev 05)
  Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:29ad]
  Kernel driver in use: i915

Then replace the i915 (Intel graphics) driver with vfio-pci (normally used for VM passthrough) to stop it being used for display:

sudo dnf install driverctl
sudo driverctl set-override 0000:04:00.0 vfio-pci

After a reboot, you should be able to see vfio-pci in use and that the status is suspended:

$ lspci -nnk -s 04:00.0
04:00.0 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation DG2 [Arc A350M] [8086:5694] (rev 05)
  Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:29ad]
  Kernel driver in use: vfio-pci
  Kernel modules: i915, xe
$ cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:04:00.0/power/runtime_status
suspended

If you wish to re-enable the dGPU later, run:

sudo driverctl unset-override 0000:04:00.0 && reboot

Asus power settings

You can get controls (including power settings) similar to MyASUS and Armoury Crate on Windows with asusctl:

sudo dnf copr enable lukenukem/asus-linux
sudo dnf install asusctl supergfxctl rog-control-center

sudo systemctl enable --now asusd supergfxd

Then you can launch ROG Control Center from your apps menu.