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

[pkunk]

Just wondering how this lap detection actually works.

[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.

[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?

[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

[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.

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.

[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.)

[skeevy420]

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.

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 .

Instead of pairing cases and processors properly and, therefore, providing safe equipment to use, they first assumed that we'd pick it up and move it when it became hot; but we iz dumb and got laptop burns so now we're going the XKCD standards route .

EDIT: And with your user name, you can own this thread.

[faldzip]

As a user of Lenovo P52 I would really appreciate this. It took me like half a year to make this crap work. I ended up with thermald service disabled in the system. That means the compilation runs at a constant 97 degrees Celsius which is hot. But this CPU is reaching 97 degrees in like 3 seconds while fans are starting and getting to max revs just in time when throttling kicks in and frequency drops to 800MHz on all cores and usually stays there until reboot.

[bitman]

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...