Arch Linux

iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

Hello dear arch users, I've got a strange issue that I cannot diagnose with my laptop Thinkpad P15s Gen2. I initially thought that it's Nvidia problem  but I switch to running sway with no nvidia drivers:

❯ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 01)

However, after booting the system, I'm still getting degraded performance in most of the application like there's no enough CPU resources to run things. Of course it's subjective but it's noticeable while using tools like PyCharm, Emacs, or even simply Firefox things become unresponsive. In Firefox it's especially bad as I cannot make calls using Google Meet or other conference services, after the connection, performance drops and calls start to freeze. There's no one single process that runs in the background with high CPU use. 

How can I diagnose the issue and what would be my best step battling the problem? I regularly update packages, and it's latest firmware.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,232

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

Check whether your cpu clocks are stuck at a low value with cpupower or turbostats or so. Sometimes there are firmware bugs here that can be solved by a UEFI/firmware update and/or trying to reset firmware state by shutting down, unplugging and taking out the battery for a few minutes (basically cut any electrical source completely) if you can't take the battery out there's also often the possibility of holding the power button for ~10secs or so during bootup.

iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

Alright, it did help to hold the power button for some time, thank you! but I couldn't really interpret cpupower output nor turbostat. Can you help me understand what I should be looking at? Perhaps there's a better solution, more permanent, than just reset laptop power via holding the button?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,232

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

If that helped then it's a firmware issue and the "permanent" solution would be an UEFI update actually fixing this -- (though I've recently anecdotally had an issue where a lenovo system would not charge while booted, turned out there's a Windows only lenovo utility that had enabled some "airplane mode" that simply prevented the system from charging while plugged in and it was *only* toggleable from said Windows utility -- but kicked in system wide as soon as the UEFI/POST was reached, so if you have that kind of a situation and no Windows at hand you might be SoL)

As for interpreting the outputs while turbostat can indeed be a bit confusing if you just run it as is, you basically want to check whether you never reach your boost/generally higher frequency clocks (might want to simulate some load with e.g. the stress utility, I'm assuming you stayed at a low clock rate during the issue and would properly boost when the issue isn't present) What I often do here because it produces somewhat more readable output is using something like

sudo watch cpupower monitor

If you want to look at this more closely maybe post some example output/the output of

cpupower frequency-info

iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

Oh, that windows nonsense doesn't sound good. Nonetheless, here's cpupower output:

❯ cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
  hardware limits: 400 MHz - 4.70 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 400 MHz and 4.70 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 3.27 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes

iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

So I updated thinkpad firmware with liveiso from Lenovo website and there they have a huge banner at the top:

Please update your BIOS to the latest version, as Lenovo has released critical BIOS updates for selected ThinkPad systems to prevent charging issues with some USB-C power device configurations. If you are not sure about this, please run Automatic Update to proceed.

However, it doesn't really help. Is there any specific packages that needs to be updated on top of the BIOS update? I'm not sure how it works

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,048

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop … _E15_Gen_2

Has the original problem actually re-emerged after you powerbutton fixed it?
Does the cpupower output indicate a significant difference (eg. being stuck at 400MHz)?

Any idea about the trigger (eg. suspend to ram)?

---

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iamkarlson

Member

Registered: 2023-01-17

Posts: 28

Re: Degraded perfomance on a thinkpad laptop

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop … _E15_Gen_2

Has the original problem actually re-emerged after you powerbutton fixed it?
Does the cpupower output indicate a significant difference (eg. being stuck at 400MHz)?

Any idea about the trigger (eg. suspend to ram)?

1. Yes, problem re-emerged after I fixed it with powerbutton
2. No, it doesn't. I ran

watch -n 1 cpupower frequency-info

and by simple looking at that, frequency jumps between 400MHz and 4.5MHz
3. Whenever many apps is running (firefox, a few electron apps like slack, pycharm) then it can happen.

However, killing all this processes doesn't help. Disconnecting from the power source seems to be fixing the problem, and that's why I was so enthusiastic about the Lenovo update. I'm wondering if it could be sway or other Desktop Environment components. I cannot trace any suspicious activity through htop or other tooling though.