MSI GE40 laptop ACPI tables and firmware bugs

[gemarcano]

For the last couple of weeks I've been looking at improving Gentoo's performance on this new laptop. Thankfully, as I commented here, Gentoo now runs on this hardware. As expected from a Windows laptop, not everything is perfect. My biggest concern right now is that my battery life is dismal and suspend doesn't quite work right (it suspends and in about 2 minutes or less comes back online). I've checked the kernel configuration and all of the appropriate parameters appear to be in place for supporting power management and suspend. In part, the power issue may be related to the kernel's inability to kill the discrete Nvidia GTX 760M (I'm reluctant to use the Nvidia blob right now and Nouveau blows up spectacularly, possibly because the intel graphics driver is already loaded-- this machine supports Optimus). That having been said, I've been reading through the kernel output, and I'm getting some interesting bits, like:

[eyoung100]

See these 2 topics for help with Optimus:

1. Optirun, bumblebee & X failures
2. [Solved]No device detected while startx?

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[gemarcano]

As an update, I've been in communication with MSI. They whined that they don't support Linux, but then I reproduced the problems in Windows too. I did find out that the Windows binaries (and the Linux binaries built from the newest sources) seem to produce better decompilations of the ACPI tables (less errors and these can be fixed). I still ran into bugs using acpiexec and acpinames. The results of that testing (on Linux it's the same result with the new binaries) is found here. To be honest, I don't know exactly what the errors these two tools report, or even if these errors make sense or if they should be there. My gut tells me that there should not be any errors. Anybody know if this is correct?

In terms of power management, I traced the problem to Nouveau. Once I switched to the Nvidia blob and configure Optimus and Primus, the laptop is now running much cooler and for much longer. Nouveau seems to be crashing itself and then preventing bbswitch from shutting off the graphics card. I'm sad that I'll have to leave Nouveau for some time, but I need the battery life.

I'm waiting for MSI to reply to my report from Windows. They claimed at one point that the Intel ACPI tools were Linux specific. Right, except that their tables were compiled with an Intel compiler, based on the table's headers. We'll see what happens.