The MediaTek Wi-Fi Driver That Made an Asus Laptop Reboot After Every Sleep
Why My Asus Laptop Kept Rebooting After Sleep and How to Fix It
After three years of closing the lid only to find his Asus Zenbook Pro 17 rebooted with a near-dead battery, a developer traced the problem to the MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922 adapter. Its driver fails to enter low-power sleep, triggering Windows' austerity battery-drain wake-up and a silent crash. Disabling the adapter's Power Saving setting in Device Manager finally fixed it.
It's important to note that this event is Windows intentionally waking the laptop up to prevent the battery from dying completely. However, because the Wi-Fi driver is already in a crashed or unstable kernel state, the system fails to recover from this forced wake-up.
- mnw21cam
I have a completely unrelated problem with my rather old Asus Zenbook UX305C. The Intel graphics driver for Linux (specifically Debian) crashes the whole OS whenever it enters DPMS screen blanking. I'm able to tell the interface while logged in to never blank, but the login/unlock screen use a completely separate X server with separate settings, and I haven't been able to work out how to just completely disable DPMS. So while it can sleep and suspend, I can never lock the screen, and when I wake it from sleep/suspend I cannot leave the login screen long enough for it to go into screensaver, because that will crash the computer.
It's annoying. Back in the mists of time when the laptop was new, it all worked fine. It's the updated Intel drivers that are broken.
- altcognito
I had Opus debug my laptop restarts. It pulled down windebug and pointed out the two drivers that were causing a problem.
One of them was an HDMI audio driver, which wasn't completely a surprise given I connect to a KVM and I imagine something was weird about the connection (and I don't listen to audio through my monitor anyway)
The other was the realtek/intel driver for audio as well? (updated those) Never have had a problem again. Felt pretty good. Windows laptops are pretty awful about coming out of power save, but works like a champ now.
- bambax
I have the same symptoms on my work PC (HP Probook) but can't apply the fix due to not having admin rights on the machine! ;-(
- OleksandrC
I've been having weird troubles with MediaTek MT7922 chip on Linux also, where sometimes Bluetooth would just die and will not recover until reboot. After researching the situation with agents, the conclusion seems to be that the firmware is buggy (which is a proprietary blob, so only MediaTek can fix it). There was a workaround - disable low-power/sleep state for this adapter - which helps, but is not great for a laptop (since it increases power drain).
And generally, if you check online, you'll see plenty of reports about problems with MediaTek. I've learned my lesson - just avoid MediaTek in general. Intel adapters seem much less problematic and better supported overall.
- ankurdhama
This is also a reminder to not compare Macs with windows laptop as there is no such thing as "windows laptop" instead there are many different types of windows laptops with different hardware components with their own firmware and drivers developed by the different companies and a driver/firmware update from any of these companies can cause all sort of issues.