System76 Oryx Pro

This article or section does not follow the Laptop page guidelines.

Reason: Missing some hardware IDs, empty Accessibility section, #Function keys needs to be updated to capture the keys correctly. (Discuss in Talk:System76 Oryx Pro)

Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
GPU (Intel)	`8086:9bc4`	Yes
GPU (NVIDIA)	`10de:2520`	Yes

Audio	`8086:06c8`	Yes
Webcam		Yes

Bluetooth		Partial
Wireless	`8086:06f0`	Yes
Ethernet	`10ec:8168`	Yes

Card reader	`10ec:525a`	Yes
Fingerprint reader		No

Booting

The System76 Oryx Pro comes with two NVMe M.2 slots. Older models have space for a 2.5" SSD/HDD. Booting from NVMe requires the use of EFI, while booting over SATA/AHCI does not. If you are not sure what to use, EFI is a sensible and safe default for all configurations of this machine.

Accessibility

TODO

Installation

System76 develops a special distribution (Pop!_OS) for their computers, and it comes with many tweaks and tools to ensure a seamless end-user experience. Arch does not have these out of the box; and unfortunately, sometimes their computers do not work right without them. Thankfully, it is possible to get the same first-class hardware support in Arch Linux that you have in Pop!_OS -- it just takes a little elbow grease.
(The rest of this article will assume you have followed the steps given in this section.)

Packages

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

Daemons

system76-driver^AUR
system76-power^AUR (needed for System76 switchable graphics and charging thresholds)
system76-firmware-daemon^AUR (seems to be needed for things like audio to work right)

Activation

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

Services

Enable the following services: (source)

system76
system76-firmware-daemon
system76-power

Modules

To make sure all drivers are being loaded correctly, run system76-driver-cli; this will automatically add necessary rules to /etc/modprobe.d, and execute mkinitcpio.

Note: However, as of 2021-04-06, this creates a malformed s76-i915-mkinitcpio.conf file, and a redundant (if you have system76-power.conf) system76-driver_i2c-nvidia-gpu.conf file. As such, this step may be skippable, for the time-being. Nevertheless, there is a known solution for the malformation: simply append 1 to options i915 in s76-i915-mkinitcpio.conf. source

Firmware

Install the following:

firmware-manager^AUR (required if you want to know when there is a BIOS update available)
system76-firmware^AUR (required if you want to update your BIOS)

To check your current BIOS version and whether there is a new version available, run firmware-manager as root. Keep in-mind that this is a GTK application, so you need to be running X or Wayland for it to run. (It has no CLI -- it does not even respond to --help.)

To update your system to the latest firmware on the next boot, run system76-firmware-cli schedule.

Graphics

This system comes complete with an integrated (Intel) and discrete (NVIDIA) graphics card. The external ports (DP over Mini-DP, DP over USB-C, HDMI) are tied to the discrete Nvidia card.

Graphics options:

System76: If you want to use the hybrid graphics mode developed by System76, follow the instructions in #Installation and #OEM switchable graphics. This seems to use PRIME behind the scenes.
Bumblebee: Some users have reported getting success with Bumblebee. Your mileage may vary if you are using a more complete DE like GNOME; this has only been tested with i3-wm.
NVIDIA: When in doubt, NVIDIA's official drivers should always work.

OEM switchable graphics

To enable System76's switchable graphics, run system76-power graphics hybrid once; and then put prime-run before every application you want to start with your dGPU. Note that this will only work for applications that use GLVND. (source)

Note:

Officially, you need to reboot your device every time you change your switchable graphics setting.
The devs have confirmed that while you can technically switch between hybrid and compute without restarting your whole computer, you must still restart X in order for the change to take effect.
Switching from hybrid to integrated will display as compute until you restart. While confusing at first blush, this is intended behavior, and technically correct. (This note is here because at least one person was confused by this.)

To verify whether switchable graphics is working, run glxinfo and prime-run glxinfo. 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 | grep -i vendor to the aforementioned commands.)

Audio

oryp6

The Oryx Pro 6 has audio that works perfectly fine out-of-the-box.

oryp7 / oryp8

Audio should work out-of-the-box with a USB headset; however, you may find that the onboard speakers are wholly unresponsive. Pop!_OS always has its kernel patched to work with Realtek PCI's quirks, thus avoiding this kind of issue; but Arch, which uses upstream Linux kernels, often has to wait quite some time to see these patches trickle down.

The following parameters can be added to /etc/modprobe.d/clevo-p950.conf to get your speakers working if your kernel does not yet support them: options snd-hda-intel model=clevo-p950. While the oryps 7 & 8 are not Clevo P950s exactly, this workaround provides the same ALC1220_FIXUP_CLEVO_PB51ED_PINS quirk that the oryps need. (source) While this workaround does enable headphone and speaker audio, it may interfere with headset mics -- your mileage may vary. (source)

Ethernet

The oryp7 has a Realtek ethernet chip whose in-tree Linux driver is (as of Linux v5.15) guaranteed to fail link autonegotiation. You can work around this issue by manually setting your onboard ethernet's link negotiation to 'ignore' or '100mbps' (How you do so depends on your computer's network manager.); however, both options mean that your Internet speed will be capped at 100mbps. In order to get your ethernet port to work at speeds above that, you will need to install Realtek's out-of-tree driver, with r8168, r8168-lts, or r8168-dkms^AUR (Although r8168 is out-of-tree, it is still open-source and GPL-licensed.). Once installed, you need to blacklist the default r8169 driver: echo "blacklist r8169" > /etc/modprobe.d/r8169_blacklist.conf.

Suspend/hibernate

Out of the box, Arch Linux does not resume a previously suspended or hibernated session. To support hibernation, ensure that you have swap space equal to or greater than your system memory (RAM), and add "resume" to your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file, per the instructions here.

If you are using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, there is also a service called nvidia-suspend. In hybrid mode at least, enabling/starting this service will allow the laptop to do a complete suspend. Be sure to save your work before starting this service for the first time, as it will put the laptop into suspend mode immediately, and will not wake up until the lid is closed and opened again.

NOTE: hibernation has yet to be tested on this device; but suspension seems to work... sometimes.

Function keys

Only keys with known functions are shown.

Oryx Pro 7
Key	Visible?	Marked?	Effect
Fn+`	Yes	Yes	`XF86AudioPlay`
`Fn+F3`	Yes	Yes	`XF86AudioMute`
`Fn+F5`	Yes	Yes	`XF86AudioLowerVolume`
`Fn+F6`	Yes	Yes	`XF86AudioRaiseVolume`

`Fn+F2`	No	Yes	Toggles power to the display
`Fn+F8`	Yes	Yes	`XF86MonBrightnessDown`
`Fn+F9`	Yes	Yes	`XF86MonBrightnessUp`

`Fn+1`	No	No	Toggles max state of fans
`Fn+F1`	Yes	Yes	`XF86TouchpadToggle`
`Fn+F10`	No	Yes	Toggles power to the webcam
`Fn+F11`	Yes	Yes	`XF86RFKill`
`Fn+F12`	No	Yes	Suspends the computer

`Fn+NumDivide`	No	Yes	Changes keyboard color
`Fn+NumMultiply`	No	Yes	Toggles power to keyboard backlight
`Fn+NumMinus`	No	Yes	Dims keyboard backlight
`Fn+NumPlus`	No	Yes	Brightens keyboard backlight

`Fn+F7`	Yes	Yes	Label: `XF86Display` Reality: `semicolon` (keydown), `Super_L` (keyup)
`Fn+PrintScreen`	Yes	Yes	Label: `SysRq` Reality: `PrintScreen` (ignores `Fn`)
`Fn+Insert`	Yes	Yes	Label: `ScrollLock` Reality: `Insert` (ignores `Fn`)
`Fn+PageUp`	Yes	Yes	Label: `Pause` Reality: `PageUp` (ignores `Fn`)
`Fn+PageDown`	Yes	Yes	Label: `Break` Reality: `PageDown` (ignores `Fn`)

Note: The broken Pause/Break keys should be fixed by this PR. It hasn't yet been deployed in an official firmware release, though.

Keyboard lighting

You can control the brightness and color of your keyboard's LEDs. To do so, install sys76-kb^AUR and then run sys76-kb set -b $B -c $C, with $B being how bright you want the keyboard (on a scale of 0-255) and $C being a 6-digit color hex (eg, "ffffff"). Since the keyboard's LEDs are controlled from the commandline, it is possible to script patterns and light shows.

Note that these settings are not maintained across boots; so you will need to reapply them on startup.

Note: Do not set your brightness lower than 100%, or the colors your keyboard displays will be random and unpredictable. (This is a known issue with the firmware on oryp6/oryp7.)

Troubleshooting

Bad thermals / excessive throttling

The oryp7, as with all System76 computers, comes with a fan curve designed to minimize noise. By default, your fans will only reach 100% at 90°C; but by the time you have reached that temperature, the CPU is already throttling hard. By setting a custom fan curve that reaches 100% at 70°C, you can easily avoid such unnecessary throttling. However, in order to customize the fan curve, you have to compile and flash the EC to your BIOS (There is an open issue to add runtime-configurable fan curves here.). Make sure to not set your lowest fan speed below around 25% on the oryp7, as doing so can cause rattling (see #163). Some people will be able to use values as low as 20%; others may need to go up to 30% or higher. There is an open pull request with settings optimized for the oryp7 here. Note that even with this better curve, your computer will still run hot. You will need to repaste the oryp6/7 if you intend to use the CPU for long periods of time.

Another thing you can try is undervolting. However, due to Plundervolt, undervolting has been disabled in the firmware. There is an issue on GitHub requesting a toggle for this mitigation.

Some have complained that the Oryx Pro's heatsink is insufficient for the CPU. At least one person claims to have resolved this issue by adding thermal pads between the CPU/GPU heatsink and the laptop's chassis.

fancontrol not working

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

In the meantime, a custom fan curve can be configured by those willing to compile their BIOS manually. Quoth one of the devs: "The fan speed is controlled by the fan curve in the firmware: system76/ec@16778e4/src/board/system76/oryp7/board.mk. You can change the fan curve by changing the values in that file before you build firmware-open." You do not actually have to build firmware-open, though -- you can simply build and flash the ec itself. The command to flash is make BOARD=system76/oryp7 flash_internal.

prime-run not working

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

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "layout"
    Screen 0 "iGPU"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "iGPU"
    Driver "modesetting"
    BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "iGPU"
    Device "iGPU"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "dGPU"
    Driver "nvidia"
    BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

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

Xorg fails to start with "No devices detected"

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

Confirm the error in ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log. The nvidia kernel module should successfully load. You may also confirm the error with dmesg or journalctl.

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 system76-power^AUR (use --help to explore options):

# system76-power graphics

Check whether the discrete NVIDIA graphics card is powered on using system76-power^AUR:

# system76-power graphics power

To power the discrete NVIDIA graphics card on, supply "on" as an argument (i.e. system76-power graphics power on). 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 lspci, and be detectable by Xorg, given that the appropriate NVIDIA driver is installed.

system76-firmware: EFI mount point not found

If using the new (replacement) EFI mount point /efi, ensure you have the mount present in etc/fstab. 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

With grub

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.

X does not start

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 dedicated or hybrid mode; so if you do not want Nvidia to do your graphics anyway, switching to compute or integrated 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.