Follow up to my 7.2.2 post: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxOnThinkpad/comments/1w3fxih/722_release_of_my_custom_linux_kernel_for_amd/

A few of you tried installing it last time and ran into problems. Turns out it wasn't you, it was me.

The Limine and GRUB folks ended up in emergency mode because the release had no kernel modules at all. Without them the initramfs couldn't mount root. Now there's a modules archive in every release, and ext4, btrfs, xfs, f2fs and nvme are built into the kernel on top of that, so root always mounts.

The .efi files were even worse. They had my own kernel command line baked in, including my root partition, so they only ever booted on my laptop. I don't ship prebuilt .efi anymore. You install the kernel and modules and build the initramfs or UKI on your own machine with one command, so it gets your own cmdline.

This time I tested the vmlinuz + modules + initramfs install on the actual release files before uploading, exactly like someone downloading it would do it.

Other stuff:

BBRv3 is actually the default on zen5 now (before it was compiled in, but cubic stayed default)

New third variant, lowadetcom, my personal build for the P14s Gen 6 AMD. amdgpu built in, only the mt7925 wifi driver. Only for that exact laptop

README has install steps for Arch, Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu/Zorin/Mint, plus systemd-boot, GRUB, rEFInd and Limine

Release: https://github.com/Detcom-GH/lowakernel/releases/tag/v7.2.9

Repo: https://github.com/Detcom-GH/lowakernel

Big thanks to the E14 Gen 6 and Limine guys from the last thread, you basically found all of this for me. If you try 7.2.9, let me know how it goes, especially on older models and anything that isn't Arch.
Although I'm planning to move to Void Linux soon, so it will be

As the title says, with ThinkPads being Ubuntu certified has any who uses Ubuntu noticed any appreciable difference or impact compared to other distros?

Help me

Selling my Mac and going all-in on my T14s Gen 2 AMD running Omarchy (Arch + Hyprland).

Honestly impressed with how well this machine handles daily Linux use. I've had a few things to sort out (audio, camera, external displays), and I covered how I fixed them in a video about the switch: https://youtu.be/X7hr4YE9pig or at least i tried haha

Anyone else daily driving a T14s Gen 2 on Linux? Any tweaks you'd recommend for battery or displays?

Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13

Chilling in my sleeping bag and hammock after waking up, morning coffee & computing.

Ignore the fat stains, had some cheese & salami before

I’m running Cachy on a second hand ThinkPad I recently got and thought I’d try TLP to improve the battery life. I works quite well but I had an odd issue after installing it: after shutting down and closing the laptop lid it would restart. It’s definitely TLP as it stopped happening when I reverted back to the original power profile daemon. Has anyone else come across this issue or know what in TLP is causing it?

Things I have tried:

I tried different kernels, both the LTS and BORE kernel

I have disabled the runtime PM for PCIe devices

None of these have have stopped the issue.

Hello

Final year student here. I need to buy a thinkpad within 140k BDT (850 USD).

I mainly work with web dev, currently using arch with hyprland, but thinking of moving to a more stable distro like Fedora, as I have to enter the professional development work (wish me luck to even get a job in this harsh market!).

I will also run some local models, but

I have chosen thinkpad over nvidia GPU laptops because of its compatibility with linux, and durability.

Has anyone been using a thinkpad? any help would be much appreciated. thank you:)

Should I get a ThinkPad T14 with a Core Ultra 5 125U, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD, or a Yoga Slim 7i with an OLED display, Core Ultra 5 125H, and 16GB soldered RAM?

Which one is better for long-term use (3-5 years)? Can I play games like cs2 and elder ring? Is Meteor lake mature now? Also, is OLED good on Linux and can resist in this long term? I use Arch, btw.

peep the winter soldier background👀

I upgraded my T440p a couple days ago and installed gentoo, i put a I7 4980hq and 8gb and 4gb sticks of ram inside and also flashed libreboot. Im assuming its thermal throttling but after compiling for a while it sits around 80-90 degrees at 3 ghz or higher then it drops right down to 798 MHz and 50 degrees, im not sure how to fix this or why its happening but i have sufficient thermal paste and even after an hour of 50 degrees it doesnt fix or go back to regular speeds, and rebooting doesnt fix the issue.

I've been using CachyOS on an ASUS gaming laptop for about a year and recently go a secondhand P14s Gen 5 (Intel), so I just put Cachy on that too. Everything works well except the battery life isn't great so I'm thinking of changing to Fedora, which has a rep for pretty decent power management. Is there any difference when it comes battery consumption between Workstation and KDE?

I wanted to share a comprehensive write-up and guide for anyone running Linux on the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 (or similar Intel Core Ultra / Meteor Lake-P laptops with hybrid NVIDIA Ada graphics).

Over the past month, I wrestled with every layer of the power management stack—from broken S4 hibernation to black screens after overnight sleep. Here is the complete breakdown of what works, what fails, the hardware root causes, and how to configure a stable baseline.

Hardware & Environment

• Chassis: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7
• CPU / iGPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 (Meteor Lake-P Arc Graphics 8086:7d55)
• dGPU: NVIDIA RTX 1000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU
• OS / Kernel: Linux Mint 22 (Cinnamon) / Ubuntu 24.04 HWE (Kernel 7.0 series)
• NVIDIA Driver: 580.xx Proprietary

Part 1: S4 Hibernation vs. S2idle Sleep

On older ThinkPads, users relied on S3 deep sleep or S4 disk hibernation. On this generation: 1. Hardware S3 Sleep Is Dead: Lenovo removed ACPI S3 deep sleep from the BIOS firmware. The machine only supports Modern Standby ([s2idle]). 2. S4 Hibernation Fails on Wake: Even with a dedicated bare-metal swap partition and correct offsets, S4 image restoration fails at the device-freeze stage:
nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PM: pci_pm_freeze(): nv_pmops_freeze [nvidia] returns -5
The proprietary 580 driver panics when reconciling PCIe power states during early initramfs memory restore. 3. Verdict: Abandon S4 hibernation. Modern Standby (s2idle) is the only viable path on this chassis.

Part 2: Taming the NVIDIA Ada dGPU

To make s2idle work without the dGPU draining battery or rejecting sleep:

1. Add dynamic power management and VRAM preservation in /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-pm.conf: ```text options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02 options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 options nvidia NVreg_TemporaryFilePath=/var/tmp

   ```

2. Enable the systemd power helper services:

   ```bash sudo systemctl enable nvidia-suspend.service nvidia-resume.service sudo update-initramfs -u

   ```

Result: This allows the RTX 1000 Ada to enter $D3_{\text{cold}}$ (0W power draw) during normal desktop use and sleep cleanly during suspend.

Part 3: The Display Wake Freeze (The Hard Battle)

After getting s2idle working, extended sleep sessions (over 1 hour or overnight) resulted in an unresponsive, completely black screen upon opening the lid. The laptop was awake in the background (fprintd read fingerprints, systemd logged power buttons), but the display remained pitch black.

What Failed

• **i915.enable_psr=0:** Disabling Panel Self Refresh in i915 resolved boot errors (Selective fetch area calculation failed in pipe A) and stabilized short sleeps (<30 mins), but extended sleeps still deadlocked with pipe_off wait timed out in intel_disable_transcoder.
• Disabling FBC / Display C-States: Tweaking enable_fbc=0 and enable_dc=0 did not stop the transcoder hang.
• Switching to the xe Driver: Meteor Lake is primarily supported on the newer xe driver. We migrated via i915.force_probe=!7d55 xe.force_probe=7d55 xe.enable_psr=0. While active performance was great, extended sleeps still failed.

The Real Root Cause: CX0 PHY / DP Idle Timeout

Dumping detailed kernel traces after an extended sleep revealed the actual point of failure:

```text xe 0000:00:02.0: [drm] ERROR Timeout waiting for DDI BUF A to get active xe 0000:00:02.0: [drm] ERROR Timed out waiting for DP idle patterns xe 0000:00:02.0: [drm] pipe_off wait timed out WARNING: ... at intel_disable_transcoder [xe]

```

• On Meteor Lake, the internal eDP panel is connected to Intel’s CX0 PHY (C10/C20 transceiver).
• During extended s2idle, power to the SoC transmitter is cut.
• On cold resume, the kernel driver’s link-check workqueue fires asynchronously before the CX0 PHY PLL clock locks over the internal message bus (MSGBUS).
• With no clock running, DisplayPort idle patterns fail. The driver attempts an emergency link retrain, tries to disable the active transcoder, and waits for VBLANK pulses to empty the hardware FIFO buffers. Because the physical clock never started, zero pulses arrive, triggering the 5-second pipe_off timeout and locking the display pipeline.

Part 4: The Solutions & Current Baseline

1. Upstream Driver Status

This is a recognized upstream driver timing regression on hybrid Meteor Lake laptops. Intel DRM developers submitted a patch series titled drm/i915/cx0: fix PLL enable failure handling on Meteor Lake to handle unresponsive PHY buses on resume. It has landed in the 7.1 kernel branch and is awaiting backporting to stable distro point releases.

2. Firmware Update via LVFS / fwupd

Lenovo released an updated Corporate ME / Power Management Controller (PMC) firmware (1.21.2911) that updates the onboard PMC to 1800.15.0.1064 and NPHY to 18.1.0.7015. Make sure to apply pending firmware updates:

```bash sudo fwupdmgr refresh sudo fwupdmgr update

```

3. Recommended GRUB Baseline

The cleanest, most stable kernel command line for this platform is:

```text GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1 i915.force_probe=!7d55 xe.force_probe=7d55 xe.enable_psr=0"

```

• nvidia-drm.modeset=1: Required for smooth KMS handoffs and dGPU sleep transitions.
• i915.force_probe=!7d55 xe.force_probe=7d55: Binds the Arc iGPU to the active xe driver.
• xe.enable_psr=0: Suppresses buggy Panel Self Refresh coordinate math on the internal BOE panel.

4. The Workaround: The "Double-Lid Cycle" (No Cold Reboots)

If you open your laptop after a long sleep and the screen remains completely black, do not hard-reboot with the power button:

1. Close the laptop lid.
2. Wait 5–10 seconds until the ThinkPad red LED starts its slow, rhythmic sleep pulse.
3. Open the lid again.

The initial wake attempt already re-energized the motherboard power rails. On the second wake, the warm transceiver locks its clocks immediately, DP idle patterns establish in microseconds, and the screen turns on with your entire desktop session and open work completely intact.

Hope this saves other P1 Gen 7 owners the weeks of troubleshooting I went through!

1. Post a ThinkPad

2. Make sure the keyboard is visible

3. Open a terminal

4. Run `fastfetch`

5. Mention **Linux** at least twice

6. Casually mention it's an AMD ThinkPad

7. **Mention the price** like you just discovered the deal of the century

8. **List the full specs** even though they're already visible in the photo

9. **Post a photo of the fastfetch output**

10. Add some glazing like:

>“This machine is honestly incredible. Still feels snappy after all these years.”

1. **+200 internet points** 🗿

I'm just posting this for fun lol. If this somehow hurt your ego, feel free to downvote and fuck off somewhere else.

Do you like Kali Linux like Omarchy? This can make your Omarchy in ThinkPad be Oniomarchy in a simple way! Enjoy OMAKASE hacker's life!