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Hi Matthew, I've been a huge fan of your work ever since, back in 2010 or 2011, thanks to you I got the Gobi 2000 mobile broadband chip working on Linux on my T
by codethief 4y ago
Hi Matthew, I've been a huge fan of your work ever since, back in 2010 or 2011, thanks to you I got the Gobi 2000 mobile broadband chip working on Linux on my Thinkpad W510!
As for the pros and cons of the `throttled` project, yes, this might not be the "officially desired" approach but I know several people who have been using to great success for years. The reality is, unfortunately, that particularly those of us who use Linux machines for work and order the most recent & powerful Thinkpads or Dells they can get their hands on, often realize later on (when the machine arrives) that the default settings handicap our machine to such a degree that we can barely work. Unfortunately, not everyone is a kernel developer, though, or knows how these things work, so quick fixes are often welcome, even if they limit the hardware's lifetime (after all, we'll buy a new device in a few years anyway).
What exacerbates this problem is that it's all very intransparent: The "official" way to solve these issues (which, as far as I understand you, is installing thermald?) is not really communicated anywhere, nor does thermald come preinstalled on any of the major distributions AFAIK[0]. What's worse, thermald often doesn't even solve the throttling issues without installing further patches. On top of that, BIOS updates by the manufacturers also seem to play a major role as manufacturers like Lenovo introduce different performance modes and things like "lap mode" etc. To be honest, to this day I haven't quite understood how these things interact and whose responsibility it is to fix things.
In my particular case, I have been using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 (which Lenovo says "supports" Linux) and at some point, after installing numerous BIOS updates and working my way through hundreds of posts on the Lenovo forums, I just gave up: My machine still regularly throttles down to 800 Mhz per core and 16W under medium load until I hit the secret Fn + H key chore to tell the BIOS to switch back to high performance mode and set the thermal limit back to the maximum.
Do you happen to have a recommendation for me as to where I should start looking (again) for a solution? Does thermald fix these issues these days? (I know that when I last looked into it, it didn't.)
[0]: (EDIT) I take that back, it looks like thermald does come preinstalled on Fedora and Ubuntu these days. At least it's present on my new Ubuntu 22.04.2 installation. Unfortunately, that doesn't really help me since (and now I remember reading this last time I looked into thermald) according to the changelog[1] for v2.3:
> - thermald will not run on Lenovo platforms with lap mode sysfs entry
Great, so I still have nowhere to go from here it seems.
[1]: https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon
- pritambaral 4y agoYou can make thermald ignore that protection by using the `--ignore-cpu-id` flag. See thread leading up to: https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon/issues/268#issuecomment-790062274 https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon/issues/268#issuecomm...
- codethief 4y agoThanks, I didn't know about that parameter! However, it does sound somewhat dangerous – sure, I could give it a shot but I basically have no idea how thermald and the firmware interact and what the consequences would be. :\ I mean, I want to ignore/disable lap mode (because that one has been just plain stupid) but I don't want thermald to completely ignore what CPU I have, either. (Essentially we're back again to the situation I described: It's all very intransparent to me.)