I've Been Running The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U + Ubuntu 20.04 As My Main System

[chithanh]

Sorry for double post, but was just thinking the bigger Lenovo's like the E595 might have 2x SO-DIMMs when they eventually come out with a Ryzen 4000U series chip. My old laptop is the E595 with Ryzen 3700U and it has two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots.

No, the Thinkpad E14 and E15 have only 1 SO-DIMM and 8 GB soldered RAM.

Thinkpad L14 and L15 AMD have 2 SO-DIMM slots.

[beaker]

Definitely wasn't cheap. Looks like for those that want two DIMMs will have to wait I don't see any L series available yet.

I got the X13 for quite a bit less than the advertised price now, I bought it during the 4-July weekend sale for about $300 less than the current model is going for on their website after doubling some discounts (they let me apply two different discounts to it).

(Edit: was looking at the wrong currency)

The SME and SEV features may be more useful than TSME, I've been reading about them a bit. Lenovo put the switch for TSME in the UEFI on the Ryzen Pro laptop.

Would be really nice to get the fingerprint reader working under Linux, looks like it stores the fingerprints on the fingerprint reader chip itself as opposed to a file in the OS. The UEFI has a switch to clear the stored fingerprints from the reader.

I found a few projects on github, but nothing that is working yet just efforts to reverse engineer different versions of the fingerprint readers Lenovo uses.

[timrichardson]

My son has the 4500U Ideapad. The build quality is good, and we have onsite warranty for four years, so Lenovo backs it. On linux (he prefers Manjaro) with 5.7, the microphone doesn't work. Sometimes if the machine is restarted without powering off, the touchpad does not respond (this has happened in rebooting from Linux to Windows too), but power off without external power fixes it. Suspend Resume does not always work but he doesn't seem too concerned about it. The microphone problem occurs on the AMD Thinkpad T14 too so hoping it gets fixed; this is the main problem.

Battery life under linux and windows is very good. The keyboard and touchpad are very good. The display is pretty good. The performance should be causing nightmares at Intel hq.

[beaker]

I haven't had any trouble with my X13, trackpad or otherwise.

The only issue is a few of the more advanced features not functioning, such as the match on chip fingerprint reader.

Few errors in my dmesg that I haven't really bothered to look into yet, but otherwise everything works ok. Suspend / sleep works just fine.

I'm on Arch with a 5.6 kernel I compiled myself, I don't run manjaro I start Arch from scratch using the Arch install media and setup the entire system myself. I'm running Gnome on wayland with amdgpu.

[chithanh]

The SME and SEV features may be more useful than TSME

I think SEV is supported officially only on Epyc chips. Given how current operating system support looks like, I don't see SME that much useful over TSME at this time.

[beaker]

I think SEV is supported officially only on Epyc chips. Given how current operating system support looks like, I don't see SME that much useful over TSME at this time.

Probably why it didn't work when I tried to turn it on in the kernel. From what I read looked like SME would be more useful where it could be used, but required software support in the OS to use. TSME is quite simple, just flipping the switch in the UEFI enables it.

Reason I mentioned SME may be more useful is that it is selective and looks like it could be used to encrypt memory used by guest VMs.

Just looking through this a bit.

https://developer.amd.com/wordpress/..._v7-Public.pdf

[Belial]

Michael -

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex14 81SS. Has a 3700u cpu with 20gb ram, 512gb nvme, using integrated gpu. Linux works well for the most part. The only problem is, the WACOM devices (screen, pen, eraser) cause a hung process. Used to be able to disable these devices in xinput on every boot and it would drop my load average and cpu usage down to normal but as of kernel 5.1 or 5.2 that isn't the case. I am looking at upgrading and giving this laptop over to the kid for school and was wondering if you've had any issues like this with your IdeaPad? I've used every kernel from 5.0 to 5.8 and it continues to have the high cpu usage problems.

[Michael]

Michael -

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex14 81SS. Has a 3700u cpu with 20gb ram, 512gb nvme, using integrated gpu. Linux works well for the most part. The only problem is, the WACOM devices (screen, pen, eraser) cause a hung process. Used to be able to disable these devices in xinput on every boot and it would drop my load average and cpu usage down to normal but as of kernel 5.1 or 5.2 that isn't the case. I am looking at upgrading and giving this laptop over to the kid for school and was wondering if you've had any issues like this with your IdeaPad? I've used every kernel from 5.0 to 5.8 and it continues to have the high cpu usage problems.

I haven't had any high CPU usage problems but also don't have any Wacom devices.