Ubuntu Making Progress On The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm Laptop Support

The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s is one of the most interesting Arm-powered laptops at the moment with this laptop powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC, 13.3-inch 1920 x 1200 display, up to 32GB of RAM, up to 28 hour battery life, and current pricing starting below $1k USD. Upstream Linux support has been progressing around the ThinkPad X13s and it looks like Ubuntu has also been making some strides on easily supporting this Arm laptop.

Linux 6.0 ended up adding initial support for the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the ThinkPad X13s while at that time it still was very much a work-in-progress. Lenovo has been helping in the ThinkPad X13s as part of their overall Linux support effort.

An important milestone being hit with the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle is the MSM DRM driver supporting the 8cx Gen 3 graphics.

Over on the Ubuntu front they have been making progress on bringing up their distribution on this nice Qualcomm-powered laptop.

Heinrich Schuchardt with Canonical commented yesterday in a status update: "Created a preinstalled image. It runs fine from NVMe but running from USB still suffers from a Linux 6.2 kernel issue. Tested a new kernel with EFI variable support."

So he's able now to get a pre-installed Ubuntu image running on the ThinkPad X13s from the NVMe storage. The EFI variable support with updated kernel addresses some bugs previously raised by Schuchardt for the X13s support on Ubuntu. This Launchpad query shows those bugs being addressed by him around the X13s.

It will be interesting to see if by the time of the Ubuntu 23.04 release if the support is in good enough shape that a ThinkPad X13s image is published or ultimately how far the Canonical engineers will be pushing this effort given the ThinkPad X13s is one of the most promising Arm laptops at the moment. In any event it's great seeing progress being made.