Lenovo Laptop Platform Profile Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.12

Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops.

Along with the previously noted ACPI platform profile infrastructure support, the Lenovo drivers are set to enable platform profile support in Linux 5.12.

As noted in that article from December, this platform profile support is allow altering the laptop hardware's operating profile characteristics around power/performance levels and in turn thermal and fan speed behavior. User-space can change the current platform profile via writing to /sys/firmware/platform_profile and then it's up to the hardware to alter its state to match the desired use-case whether it be desiring a low-power mode, cool operation, quiet operation, balanced thermal/power, or simply wanting the best performance out of the hardware. Users can manually (or scripted) manipulate the sysfs platform profile state or there is the likes of the Power Profiles Daemon that has work pending for automatically changing the behavior based on various conditions.

The ACPI platform profile infrastructure was sent into the power management "pm-next" tree back in December while today the Lenovo driver changes made it into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle opening later this month.

There is the addition to thinkpad_acpi for enabling the support for Lenovo devices with DYTC Version 5 or newer and supported modes there are low-power / balanced / performance. Similar support was queued today to ideapad-laptop in providing this platform profile support for various Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, also needing DYTC Version 5 or newer.

Long story short, Linux 5.12 is set to allow newer Lenovo laptops to alter the operating behavior between low-power / balanced / performance modes either manually or with upcoming user-space components (GNOME's Power Profiles Daemon so far).