System76 Oryx Pro

The BIOS menu is extremely minimalist, with essentially no settings outside of boot order. All entries can be accessed from the keyboard, and should be easy to OCR.

There is no official documentation around which buttons to press to enter the BIOS. The splash screen says that opens the overall BIOS menu, and starts the Pop!_OS recovery partition.

Within the BIOS menu, you can use the arrow keys (/) to move the cursor, the Enter/Return key to activate or save things, PageUp/ to relocate things, and to cancel an operation or to go back to a previous menu. All lists are vertical, and progress from top-to-bottom.

1. The first option in the BIOS menu is "Boot Default", and it is where your cursor starts out. Activate this to continue the boot as if you had not pressed at all.
2. The second option is "One Time Boot". This provides a menu of all boots known to the BIOS, in the order the BIOS knows to boot them. The cursor starts at the top of this menu. Activate one to boot to it.
3. The third option is "Change Boot Order". This one is a bit odd, as you have to press Enter/Return twice to use it, after which you will be in an ordered list of possible boots, which can be mutated using the controls describe above. Note that must be pressed twice to return to the main menu. There is an open ticket to simplify this flow here.
4. The fourth (and final) option is "Firmware Configuration Information". This page simply lists information about the firmware.

There is no diagnostic LED on the motherboard. The official technical documentation does not discuss whether the motherboard beeps when there is an issue, nor does it say what such beeps could mean.

There are three status LEDs on the front-left of the bottom half of the laptop. The left LED is for power, the center LED is for the battery, and the right LED is for IO. More information can be found in the official technical documentation.

If you are replacing Pop!_OS on the NVMe that came with your laptop, it is recommended to leave the recovery partition intact. The BIOS is hard-coded to attempt to boot this on , and this recovery partition can be a handy way to get out of a tight spot if something should happen that renders your Arch install unbootable.

System76 automatically updates this recovery partition from within Pop!_OS; at present, it is not known how to update it from within Arch Linux.

It may be possible to replace the contents of this recovery partition with any LiveCD you want, but as of now it is not known if anyone has tried.

While the oryp7 is known to at least boot with Linux 5.13, there will be missing functionality until 5.15 and higher, because System76 pushed several patches to upstream that were not merged until then. Accordingly, it is not recommended to use a kernel older than 5.15.

All necessary packages can be found in the AUR. It is recommended to install everything in the list below.
(There are also "-git" versions of many of these packages, if you wish to be bleeding edge.)

Modules

• system76-acpi-dkms^AUR

Daemons

• (needed for System76 switchable graphics and charging thresholds)
• (seems to be needed for things like audio to work right)

Once you have installed the above, you will need to tell your computer to use them.

Services

Enable the following services: (source)

• system76-power

Modules

To make sure all drivers are being loaded correctly, run ; this will automatically add necessary rules to , and execute mkinitcpio.

"EC" refers to the "embedded controller", and is where the bulk of user-relevant settings exist in the BIOS.

System76 may not provide firmware updates for your model forever; and those they do provide often do not come out in a timely manner. Thankfully, you can flash the latest version of the EC from GitHub (with all its numerous fixes) yourself, by first cloning the repository and then running the following command: -- just make sure to replace $MODEL with your actual model (eg "oryp8"). System76 performs QA on all PRs before they are merged into master, meaning that master can generally be considered stable.

Fan curve

The Oryx Pro's fan curve is hard-coded, meaning you have to configure, compile, and flash your own custom version of the EC in order to change your fan curve. (There is an open issue to add runtime-configurable fan curves here.).

The default fan curve for the all System76 computers is designed to minimize noise (source). Unfortunately, in the Oryx Pro's case, this goal is taken to an extreme: by default, the fans will only reach 100% at 90°C; and your CPU starts to throttle well before that point. By setting a custom fan curve that reaches 100% at Tjunction (typically a few degrees above 70°C), you can easily avoid such unnecessary throttling.

There is a PR available that fixes these issues for the oryp7.

Voltages

There is no user-configurable option to change voltages at the BIOS-level. However, some have managed to disable the Plundervolt mitigations, in doing so re-acquiring the ability to undervolt their Oryx Pros from userland. There is an issue on GitHub requesting a toggle in the BIOS for this mitigation.

To enable System76's switchable graphics, run once; and then put before every application you want to start with your dGPU. Note that this will only work for applications that use GLVND. (source)

To verify whether switchable graphics is working, run and . These commands should succeed and have different vendors. If the latter command fails, go to #prime-run not working. (Note that you can limit the output to just the relevant information by appending to the aforementioned commands.)

The Oryx Pro, like most (all?) System76 laptops to-date, are derived from Sager/Clevo models. The below table shows which models correspond to each other. This can be useful when shopping for parts online.

Thermal paste/pads

As confirmed to an attendee of Southeast Linuxfest 2022 by a System76 employee, System76 (like most OEMs) uses the cheapest, most-generic thermal paste it can find, in order to reduce costs at scale. Repasting your CPU/GPU can result in noticeable improvements to the speed at which they decrease in temperature after a spike, but it will not prevent such spikes from happening; see the "Main heatsink" subsection here for information about why that is.

Upgrading the stock thermal pads can also improve heat transfer, but System76 has confirmed (via support ticket) that it does not have any documentation on the proper thicknesses to use for these pads, meaning that replacing them bears risk that replacing the paste does not.

Main heatsink

The heatsink that cools the CPU and GPU does not have enough thermal capacity to cool them (the CPU especially). What this means, in practice, is that you will see WILD temperature swings at even mild usage: it is common to see going from 1% usage to 10% usage result in a jump from 50°C to 90°C in less than a second. The only solution to this, is to add more thermal capacity to the heatsink. The easiest and cheapest way to do this, is to lay thermal pads on-top of the main heatsink, until those pads start to squish into the aluminium chassis at the bottom. This will substantially ameliorate such jumps in temperature, and the corresponding fan spin-up that follows them. (source) An added benefit of tying your main heatsink to your bottom chassis, is that the bottom chassis is fan-cooled, just like your main heatsink -- which means that not only are you adding extra thermal capacity, you're also increasing the amount of active cooling you have.

PCH

The PCH comes without a heatsink, and will idle around 85°C. This is obviously not good for longevity. Adding a small heatsink to it can make a nice difference; but you can get an even bigger one by first building up the area around the PCH with thermal tape until you are level with the die, and then affixing a wider heatsink to the whole area. Yet more gains can be had by removing the insulating plastic directly above this heatsink, and replacing it with a thermal pad; this will create thermal contact between your DIY PCH heatsink and the laptop's aluminium chassis. Combining all of these tricks gets a PCH that idles around 40°C -- that's an unheard-of 45°C drop.

NIC

The NIC comes without a heatsink, and can idle around the 65°C range. Adding a heatsink and ensuring thermal contact with the aluminium chassis can lower this by 15°C.

Fans

Many, though not all, users have reported hearing a "clicky" noise in the fans when they spin up or down. System76 has introduced a 25% floor for fan speeds, in an effort to reduce this; but it still happens for some users. Your best bet, if you are affected by this, is to file a ticket with System76 support, asking for new fans. If you are under warranty, these should be provided to you if you can procure an audio recording of the clicking; if you are not, then you will have to pay for the fans.

In addition to or as an alternative to replacing the fans, you can also try changing the speed floor. Some people will be able to use values as low as 20%; others may need to go up to 30% or higher. See #Firmware for more information around how to change your fan curves.

Coil whine

Some users report very noticeable coil whine. There's not much that can be done about this, but you can try coating your motherboard and other components in insulating varnish, taking great care to avoid coating surfaces you might want to attach thermally-conductive material to later-on. This coating may not completely resolve the issue, but it should help to mute it somewhat. Beware, though, that such varnishes are typically seriously toxic, and significant precautions may be necessary for you to work with them safely.

The spacebar may never actuate if pressed on its sides. This is because its stabilizers are quite flimsy. If you want to use the whole length of your spacebar, you will need to replace the stock stabilizers with some custom ones made of spring-steel wire.

Shut down − do not simply restart when encountering weird issues (e.g. where system76-power throws a strange error, and rebooting does not help). As explained by a System76 engineer at Southeast Linuxfest 2022, shutting down hard-resets certain components that stay on during reboots.

For software-level fixes, see #BIOS Settings.

For hardware-level fixes, see #Heatsinks.

system76-acpi-dkms^AUR does not currently support runtime configuration of fan speeds, so and will not work. There is an open feature request for this, though.

In the meantime, you can hard-code a custom fan curve per the instructions in #BIOS Settings.

Try creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-intel-nvidia.conf and adding the following to it: (source)

Change the fields above to match the first field in the output of this command: lspci | grep −E "VGA | 3D" (you can omit leading zeroes). You will need to restart your X server for this to take effect.

If you find (normally after an update & restart) that launching X (via or otherwise) does not work, you may confirm that the device is installed and working by doing the following:

Confirm the error in . The kernel module should successfully load. You may also confirm the error with or .

Check whether both integrated and discrete graphics cards are available:

# lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 630 (Mobile)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU106M [GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile] (rev a1)

If you do not see the second entry (or some similar NVIDIA card), make sure the card has been turned on by (use to explore options):

# system76-power graphics 

Check whether the discrete NVIDIA graphics card is powered on using :

# system76-power graphics power

To power the discrete NVIDIA graphics card on, supply "on" as an argument (i.e. ). After doing so and querying again, you should see:

# system76-power graphics power
on (discrete)

Once the card is powered on, it should show up in the output of , and be detectable by Xorg, given that the appropriate NVIDIA driver is installed.

If using the new (replacement) EFI mount point /efi, ensure you have the mount present in . You may find the appropriate device to mount by using a combination of lsblk and fdisk -l.

# fdisk -l # List disks (one device will be designated as "EFI System")
# lsblk    # List devices and mount points, you should see the EFI system device, and confirm whether it is mounted/unmounted
# mount device /efi
#
# genfstab -U / # (optional) print fstab configuration for inclusion/merging into /etc/fstab

After doing the above, it might be a good idea to schedule a firmware update:

# system76-firmware-cli schedule

After scheduling a firmware update, ensure that GRUB is set to use the EFI partition like so:

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=grub
# cp /boot/grub/grub.cfg /boot/grub/grub.cfg.bak
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Restart to trigger the firmware update.

If you have anything plugged-into the HDMI port on the back, this is why. Unplug your HDMI cord, boot the computer, and plug it back in after X starts. This issue only happens when the Nvidia card is used for display, either in or hybrid mode; so if you do not want Nvidia to do your graphics anyway, switching to or will fix this problem. If you actually do want to use your Nvidia card, though, there is currently no known fix; but watching Linus swear at Nvidia may prove therapeutic. Worth noting, though: Pop!_OS handles this just fine, so there may be something missing in Arch that is not missing in Pop!_OS.