Lenovo To Address Linux Laptop Thermal Throttling, Lower Performance Against Windows

[ssokolow]

What happened to thermal throttling being.. thermal? Who cares when the damn thing is put - if its hot we want it throttled. Talk over-engineering much...

The idea is that, if it's safe for the hardware to run hot, then it matters whether the thermal tolerance of the human's lap has become the limiting factor.

Currently, it is thermally throttling to a value that won't cause problems if your laptop is on your lap.

Think of this like boost clocking. If the system detects a certain situation, it can allow extra performance within the confines of that workload's characteristics. (being safe to run hot in the thermal throttling case, being a single-threaded workload in the boost-clocking case.)

[Guest]

While I understand the reasoning of a corporation designing their product with mentally challenged people in mind, how about letting people disable this mistake of a feature from BIOS?

Also, huge thanks to Intel for implementing such a feature in a way that's this broken.

[Vistaus]

There is a solution to this problem already, called throttled, available here: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled which is able to set the cTDP, allow undervolting, etc.

Doesn't work on my 2018 ThinkPad L380 Yoga, so I wouldn't call it a solution for all.

[kpedersen]

The ultimate fix will be for both users and major OEMs, like Lenovo and Dell, to pressure Intel to actually upstream and maintain DPTF on Linux.

Since when did Linux become a corporate project? If it is important, the community should maintain it. Frankly the Linux developers are potentially much smarter than Intel developers.

We should stop putting corporations on a pedestal

[Venemo]

Doesn't work on my 2018 ThinkPad L380 Yoga, so I wouldn't call it a solution for all.

Did you try?

Which CPU does your laptop have btw?

[Space Heater]

The ultimate fix will be for users and major OEMs to accept that extremely thin products have drawbacks and providing inadequate thermals is one of them .

Great job at disregarding the actual facts, Linux is affected by this and Windows is not. You can complain about thermals on ultrabooks in general, but the issue being talked about is specific to operating systems that don't have DPTF support from Intel.

Since when did Linux become a corporate project? If it is important, the community should maintain it. Frankly the Linux developers are potentially much smarter than Intel developers.

We should stop putting corporations on a pedestal

There's several things wrong with this post.
1. This isn't something that can simply be maintained by the community, this stuff is not upstreamed and to my knowledge not publicly documented. You're essentially saying that volunteers should be able to reverse engineer this in their spare time (it's not trivial at all) and then also keep up with the pace of consumer hardware/firmware churn.
2. Do you not realize that Intel is one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel? Many Linux developers are also Intel developers, and either way it's insulting to play the "who is smarter" game.
3. Linux contributions have been dominated by corporations for years, if this is a surprise to you, then you simply haven't been paying attention.

[pkunk]

Just wondering how this lap detection actually works.

[Vistaus]

Did you try?

Which CPU does your laptop have btw?

I did try, 2x in the last couple of weeks to be exact. My ThinkPad L380 Yoga has an Intel Kaby Lake R CPU.

[edwaleni]

Frankly the Linux developers are potentially much smarter than Intel developers.

I will remember that when the next release of Clear Linux comes out.

[torsionbar28]

Since when did Linux become a corporate project? If it is important, the community should maintain it. Frankly the Linux developers are potentially much smarter than Intel developers.

We should stop putting corporations on a pedestal

You must be new. Back in the 90's, this is exactly how Linux operated. Everything was reverse engineered by hobbyists in their spare time. From the time new hardware landed at retail, it took several *years* until it was working under Linux, if ever. You're probably too young to remember the FOSS uproar that was caused by the so-called "win-modems" of the late 90's, where the dialup modem vendors moved much of the logic out of hardware, and into their proprietary Windows-only drivers, and wouldn't even talk to FOSS developers.

Fast forward a few years, and Linux is now big business. Hardware vendors are publishing the Linux drivers and hardware enablement code *before* the hardware is even available to the public. Now you tell me which scenario is better for end users of Linux.

We should stop demonizing corporations