ROG Ally - Front Buttons Not Functioning
I have a fresh install of Bazzite (not dual booted) in my ROG Ally. No matter what I do, I can’t get the two special buttons on the front to work. This means I can’t pull up the QAM or overlay. I’ve fully updated everything I can find, I’ve tried toggling the swap buttons option in HHD on and off, etc and I’m not seeing any reason for them to not be working. This is in Game and Desktop mode. Prior to this, they both worked great in Windows.
70 Replies
uh if hhd is running youre the first to have this issue
perhaps mcu_powersave is still on
turn the device off and hold the power button for 20 seconds
until the lights flash
I held it down for 30 seconds and no lights flashed. Turning it back on to see if it helped anyways
Is it possible HHD is installed and opens, but isn’t running in the background or on startup? If so, how would I check?
journalctl -b 0 | fpasteyour controller is a bit messed up
needs to reset
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/mcu_powersave then shutdown
and hold the power button for 30 seconds
@Kyle Gospo gpu driver is complaining
can you yank the 6.10 image while we wait?
just point stable to the 09 imageI tried running that command and got a permission denied error
oh
youre right
@Aru how to rebase to image 09
so yeah i have 2 suggestions
one is to rebase to the image from 9 aug
and the second one is to hold the power button harder
so the MCU resets
Harder as in longer, or physically harder? lol. I’ll try that first in case it works before having to rebase
both
something is off on your device
both the controller did not wake up
and the wmi stuff is missing
6.10 has been on stable for quite a while now
if this was a problem there'd be more than this report
only known thing is the UMA bug
i dont think its related to that
but look at the logs
lots of drm stack traces
yeah that's sus
is the UMA bug all of 6.10?
or 6.10.4
I tried 6.10.3 and same
so I'm assuming all of 6.10
just missed it
just for that bug i already had 4 reports today
yank it
yeah it's going
i can't yank like 2 weeks of updates
kernel-ba is ready to merge
yeah but jan is fixing his car then +8 hours
Held it for 40 seconds (harder than before). Now I’m getting to a black screen. At least it’s something different 🤷
Power cycled, back in game mode now, still no buttons
Is the recommendation still to rebase?
Yup
And after that windows
Did you go from windows straight to bazzite?
Yup. Had windows, booted to USB, had gParted clear out my partitions as Bazzite gave a “device in use” error when attempting to clear the disk, booted to USB again, then installed Bazzite fresh (taking up the entire disk)
Very weird
And buttons never worked?
Never. When I go into desktop mode, the Steam game pad config kicks in and my joysticks work as a mouse, so I never had to hold down the button to get mouse mode either.
Your device is missing half of the interface
That would happen to me lol
Is there a specific build to use for blazzite-rollback-helper? Or should I just do a full reinstallation?
Yeah may ninth
Do not reinstall
Wouldn't help anyway
Will do (may ninth)
August sorry
I'm a bit all over the place
The one from two weeks ago
Alright, using the August one. To be sure, do I use the bazzite-deck:39-20240809, or is there a different non -deck image I should be using?
Where did you find that tah
The updates, rollbacks, and rebasing on bazzite documentation page which was showing the content from the Rebasing on Bazzite page.
That document is not specific to the Ally though, so I don’t want to just assume it’s the right image
40.20240809.0
Fixed that part now. Am I good with the bazzite-deck part? I just want to make sure I’m not using a steam deck image on the Ally or what not
yes, bazzite-deck is correct
Thanks! And off it goes…
Done, still no buttons
You did reboot after, yes?
Yup! Entered the command, let it do its thing, it told me to enter the command to reboot, and I did so. Now it’s back in the game ui
Something is special about your device
I swear that’s always how it goes lol
The dmi looks correct
The only thing I’ve done to it is replace the SSD a long time ago
Your bios is 335 it's a bit old
Although that shouldn't affect stuff
You used Linux before?
Yeah
Which and when
Personally. Not on this device.
Oh
Sorry, I read it wrong
Is there a way for me to update the bios from bazzite (without having to reinstall windows and the ASUS app)
Just in case
Also part of the logs are missing
There's a chance with a USB stick
How are part of the logs missing? I ran the full command. I swear this device is going to be the end of me lol.
In the middle
I have 0 idea
You might have to reinstall after figuring out the bios
What guide did you follow
Universal Blue
Bazzite Inital Setup and Installation for Handheld PCs
Re-download the ISO at your convenience. Yesterday the new batch had issues that were fixed later on.
bazzite-rollback-helper list will list available bazzite images.
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase image_goes_name_here for to rollback, you can use a version from the list command. Note, due to a recent issue, currently only images from around 07/02 and later will currently work
note that rebasing to an image will lock you to that OS image, you will no longer get regular OS updates.
To get back to regular OS updates later after there's bugfixes, run:
bazzite-rollback-helper rebase stableAlright, I updated the BIOS and the buttons still aren’t working. I tried a fresh reinstall before that with no luck, but I’m going to try another one with the bios updated. I also disabled secure boot this time.
If that doesn’t work though, I’m running out of ideas
Reinstalled the OS after updating the BIOS, still no buttons
sucks, something is iffy on your setup
post another log when yo ucan
https://paste.centos.org/view/ee24a2b6
The OS and games work great outside of the non-working buttons. If there was a way to remap something else to take over the functionality of those buttons I’d honestly be fine at this point lol
Those buttons do not exist in your device
That’s always fun to hear lol. If there’s no hope in getting the buttons to work, is there a way to map something like the back pedals to work as overlay/QAM in game-mode?
The whole device that does that is missing
You need to find a way to reset the mcu
This usually happens if extreme power save is turned on and the device gets confused
The only way of fixing it is holding the power button until the LEDs flash red
And right now they aren’t flashing. Maybe if I reinstall windows I can get into the armory crate and make sure extreme power save is off.
and bazzite cant even turn it off
when you reset the mcu the LEDs will flash red for a bit
I watched the entire device the last time I tried, but just so I can narrow my focus, are the LEDs the ones on the top of the device by the power button, or the RGB under the sticks? I’m assuming it’s the top ones?
the rgb under the sticks
will flash red when the mcu resets if you hold the power button
The Asus driver breaks on your device
Are you fully up to date?
@Jan what's the status of Asus Linux on kernel ba
should be the same patch set as the last time 6.9 was built, no?
Yes
Let's verify first
Seems like the Asus wmi driver errors out
And disables itself
Which then causes the suspend quirk to not be active
Which then confuses the MCU and breaks it
The log I'm looking at has 6.10
So he's not on 6.9 yet
Let's hold off on 6.10 for a while
Seems like Luke sent another patchset for that
Could be causing this
Tldr please update
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/T/
Here's the patch, adds a fan called mid
Seems like checking this fan might error out on certain allies
I'm so confused this has been there a while
every patch in this patchset has been merged into the kernel and been part of it since 6.6-rc1
Yeah saw
Well we need to wait for him to try 6.9
Maybe there was something in 6.10
did you fix it? I have 1-2 commands you can try
or did you go back to windows, which will probably fix it as well
wait 1 second inbetween
Hey! Sorry for the radio silence, it’s been a crazy week so I haven’t had any more time to work on getting it up and running yet. I did buy an Ally X though and it’s working amazingly with Bazzite. If I can get it on the original Ally too that would be great. I’ll give it a try tomorrow.
No problem, if you put windows on it and it works it will also work on bazzite now
Those steps were only if you didn't use windoes