$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

Interestingly the Awinc aw88399 smart amplifier chip at the core of this issue allegedly got supporting in 6.7, in 2023. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-Sound

I have a couple old-ish Samsung Galaxy Book x86 tablets that have a similar issue, that I have never quite goaded myself into trying to reverse engineer. I'd love some better material on trying to reverse engineer windows drivers: presumably maybe running windows in qemu with some kind of intercepting pass through?

If only people would do these bounties for ITE sensor hubs.

it's the management structure that's broken. Plenty of decent engineers around microsoft who could fix it, plenty of customer and enterprises willing to pay, but they are not allowed to work on it because of prioritization bullshit, allegedly they could get more money elsewhere

That's literally the issue, management by KPI frameworks

That thread is a fun (though frustrating for them!) conversation to read through.

After about a hundred back-and-forths getting the guy with the actual hardware to try different commands, I was thinking to myself man, maybe he should just give him remote access to work on the target PC, this is torture for both of them. And then I see him comment:

> Honestly I'm thinking of this and maybe something insane like organizing ssh access or something to quit torturing Nadim with building and rebooting all the time

And Nadim replies:

> Haha, sorry, but there's no way I'm giving you SSH access!

> I’m fine with continuing with tests!

Which is fair enough! But was funny to see right when I was thinking the same thing. Great perseverance from both of them.

Was slightly disappointing they they moved off GitHub to Discord eventually so after all that, we miss the moment of them actually getting it working!

I use a T530, which is the larger brother of the T430. My overall impression is that it's a fine machine. (A lot of that opinion is motivated by the fact that when I bought it, it represented the very last of the plain black business-ey 15" PC laptops that wasn't cursed by the inclusion of a numeric keypad. Nowadays, Framework might fill that niche.)

Anyway: IIRC, a lot of the reason for locking down wireless hardware support is the FCC. AFAIK, the machine is tested and certified as a whole: The entire combination of its chassis and antennas and shielding and transmitting radios forms the item-under-test.

It's not just the sum of its parts; the whole thing gets tested. Deviation by end-users can result in having a non-compliant device, and the BIOS seeks to restrict that deviation.

And no, I don't like that aspect either.

But it only cares about the radios[1]. The rest of the guts are pretty freely exchanged: Upgrade to a different optical drive? SSD? Hard drive? RAM? CPU? Hack in a different keyboard? It's not picky at all about those things; have at it. (They could have locked down the entire system so that only parts matching a secret sauce would work, but they didn't.)

Anyway, Bluetooth module is garbage even under Windows. It's a bad design.

I bought my T530 from some random seller on eBay. It was obviously rebuilt by an outfit where they have a pile of variously-destroyed computers and take the cleanest chassis and put it with the fanciest screen and the nicest motherboard and sell it with some manner of RAM and an SSD for as much as they can get, even if that particular combination of stuff was never sold by Lenovo.

And that's fine, except: The Bluetooth module didn't work. I became convinced that it didn't even have one, even though it was advertised as including Bluetooth. So I bought a Bluetooth module (after validating the correct Lenovo FRU from the service manual, of course) and tore the thing apart to install it.

And once I was in there, I discovered that there was already a Bluetooth module present. It just wasn't installed properly.

IIRC there's one screw, one alignment pin, and one board-to-board connector for that part. The screw was tight, the pin was lined up fine, but the connector wasn't quite seated. It looked OK at a glance, but the whole module, in-situ, was very slightly bent by doing all 3 of those things concurrently.

That was annoying because only a bad design would have allowed for this to happen in the first place.

But I put my "new" non-bent module in and... it worked. (I haven't used it in Linux yet, though. Day job requires Windows software that talks to external hardware and I don't like dual-boot systems, so I'm kind of stuck.)

In terms of upgrading that part: It looks like the next wireless card is almost certain to also include Bluetooth by default, so after I hack the BIOS (I have a flashy-tool to poke at it with and an entire spare motherboard) to get around the trickery and plug a different wifi card in, I'll also have a newer Bluetooth radio.

[1]: I deliberately didn't mention batteries. My T530 still has the official Lenovo-minted BIOS; I've even updated it myself at one point using a Lenovo download. But it came to me with an aftermarket battery that worked great for a couple of years, and it now has a different aftermarket battery that also works great. I've heard the storied ruminations about aftermarket battery woes but simply have not experienced them myself. Indeed, the positive reviews on the Amazon listing I bought from suggests that it wasn't an issue for any of those folks, either -- it was like a sea of people who were just blissfully unaware of the issue.