Ubuntu-Certification

Feedback on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon - Raven

Asked by Dave Chiluk

With version 1.11 of the bios for the Thinkpad x1 carbon - 4th Generation, the CPU fan is constantly running.

This leads to high power usage, and incredibly poor run-times. ~3-4 hours under normal usage. With a regular usage of roughly 8-9W, under minimal screen brightness.

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Po-Hsu Lin (cypressyew) said : 		#1

Hello,
This sounds like a BIOS issue to me, please contact Lenovo [1][2] or open a bug report if you think it's related to Ubuntu.

[1] http://support.lenovo.com/
[2] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/English-Community/ct-p/Community-EN

Thanks!!
FAQ #2193: “XXXX is broken, I need to file a bug”.

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#2

Well it looks like the processor package never reaches a lower power usage state beyond PC2 while idle *(as seen with powertop -> Idle Stats). This is what is leading to the increased power usage, and thusly fan usage.

Blog posts about the issue
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/42156.html

That being said, I think the certification team should check the package power state state statistics before certifying hardware going forward.

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#3

I also opened
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1579917

To track this specific issue on Ubuntu proper.

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Po-Hsu Lin (cypressyew) said : 		#4

Cool, thanks for the bug report.
I also noticed that this system[1] was certified with pre-installed Ubuntu, did your laptop came with Ubuntu pre-installed on it?

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201602-20819/

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#5

No my machine did not come with Ubuntu pre-installed. I live in the US and Lenovo doesn't understand there is a market there for Ubuntu pre-installed. That being said, I do not think a fix is available for this. I'm fairly certain that the pre-installed version likely has the same issue.

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Po-Hsu Lin (cypressyew) said : 		#6

Cool, thanks for the bug report, I noticed that one of our college has already working on that.

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#7

If by colleague you mean Colin, he's not really working on it as we don't have specific enough information as to why the package is not reaching lower power states. We should engage Lenovo, and probably Intel on this one.

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#8

Well it looks like updating the IMEI firmware resulted in me being able to reach the lower power states when running with an nvme drive *(I already had the latest bios). Machines with sata drive, may still require kernel patches.

Can someone else please verify this finding?

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Dave Chiluk (chiluk) said : 		#9

IMEI Firmware update looks to be a verified fix now.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116591