A system including asymmetric control of high-speed bidirectional signaling includes a slave device and a master device that is coupled to the slave device via a plurality of bidirectional data paths, for example. The master device may control data transfer between the master device and the slave device. More particularly, the master device may adaptively modify transmit characteristics subsequent to adaptively modifying receiver characteristics based upon information received from the slave device via one or more unidirectional data paths.