ASUS TUF Laptops With Ryzen Are Now Patched To Stop Overheating On Linux
The ASUS TUF laptops with Ryzen CPUs like the FX705DY, FX505DY, and GA502DU turned out to have quite a show-stopping problem on Linux. At boot its ACPI implementation would put the laptop cooling in a "silent mode" causing the CPU and GPU cooling to operate at a minimum. But any game or CPU intensive workload would end up heating up the CPU to the point of throttling around 399MHz and being stuck that way until next reboot.
An independent Linux developer has now had his patches accepted for addressing this issue by exposing the ACPI thermal throttle policy for this ASUS TUF laptops. By default now rather than being limited to the "silent" mode, the default thermal throttling policy is enabled at boot where the cooling fans will operate as intended and similar to the Windows defaults. This in turn should avoid the ASUS TUF laptops with Ryzen CPUs from thermal throttling so easily.
This new support to the asus_wmi Linux driver also now exposes the "overboost" capability of the cooling fans where they will ramp up quicker to help avoid throttling in heavy workloads. With the patches that will land for Linux 5.6, the ASUS thermal policy can be configured now via /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/throttle_thermal_policy.
Those wanting to patch the driver themselves to avoid having to wait for the next kernel cycle can find the asus_wmi patches here and here. These patches are already residing with linux-platform-drivers-x86.git until the forthcoming Linux 5.6 merge window.
This problem for ASUS laptops with Ryzen CPUs has been known since at least last summer with bug reports where numerous users reported this behavior and some resorting to disabling the CPU's boost capability outright in an attempt to avoid throttling.
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