Lenovo ThinkPad P15s

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Reason:
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Hardware
PCI/USB ID
Working?
GPU (Intel)
Yes
GPU (NVIDIA)
Yes
Wireless
Yes
Audio
Yes
Touchpad
Yes
Webcam
Yes
Card reader
Yes
Bluetooth
Yes
Thunderbolt
Yes
Fingerprint reader
Yes
The
Thinkpad P15s
is a thin-and-light 15.6" workstation laptop from Lenovo's 2020 ThinkPad P lineup.
This page specifically concerns the specifics of running Arch Linux on this laptop. See
Laptop
for generic laptop-related information, or
ThinkPad
for other ThinkPad laptops.
Hardware
Thunderbolt 3
Warning
Ensure you are on the latest BIOS, doing the following steps on older BIOSes may brick your device.
To use Thunderbolt 3:
1. Go into BIOS
2. Enable BIOS Assist mode: (Thunderbolt 3 -> Enable BIOS assist mode)
NVIDIA
Prime features
The NVIDIA driver now supports PRIME Offloading.
Following this guide
you can try out this new mode.
Power management
To get the best power options the graphics card may be configured to use low power mode by
following the guide here
Optimus manager
Currently, one of the easiest solutions for this laptop is to use
optimus-manager
with the hybrid backend. This requires the most up to date nvidia and xorg-server packages.
This allows easy switching between the PRIME offloading feature above, and a mode where external display ports (HDMI and USB-C) work.
Steps to setup after a fresh install:
Install nvidia proprietary driver 'prime', not bumblebee.
Reboot.
Install
optimus-manager-git
AUR
.
Reboot.
optimus-manager --switch nvidia
# this will restart your X session, but not make the change persistent.
lspci -knnd ::03xx
should say:
Kernel driver in use: nvidia
.
xrandr
should list HDMI output - try to configure screen, should work.
nvidia-settings
should work.
optimus-manager --set-startup nvidia
makes it persistent.
Check: reboot, external display should still work.
Audio
This laptop requires
Sound Open Firmware
in order for the soundcard to work.
Fingerprint
The 1.90.1 version of fprint supports this device.
Webcam
The webcam in this laptop is capable of "Windows Hello" which has a Linux version called
Howdy
. The device you should use to configure howdy on this laptop is
/dev/video0
. It is possible that
Howdy
will only use the RGB camera, in this case some additional configuration and software is required. Follow
the Reddit guide for the X1 Extreme Gen2
on installing
chicony-ir-toggle
and setting it up as a service. Or you can just install
chicony-ir-toggle-git
AUR
, which automatically helps you enable the IR camera after booting the system and waking up from sleep. Before installing
chicony-ir-toggle-git
AUR
, make sure you change the local variables in
prepare()
in PKGBUILD to match your own IR camera. In this case try changing the video device to
/dev/video2
in the howdy config (
howdy config
as root), if everything has worked correctly when running
howdy test
as root the IR Camera should have a very faint red light. This will indicate that the camera is functioning and
Howdy
is using the IR camera correctly.
Keyboard
Backlight
If you would like to enable the keyboard backlight, run:
# echo 2 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/brightness
The "2" represents the brightness and can be any value between 0 and 2 (inclusive) for the laptop. For example, to turn off the keyboard backlight, you would run:
# echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/brightness
Touchpad
The touchpad works out-of-the-box with libinput. However, it will be very insensitive.
Make sure to not install
xf86-input-synaptics
- this driver is deprecated, lacks all features mentioned below, but is still installed by default with the
xorg-drivers
group.
You can check which input driver Xorg is using for your touchpad with:
$ grep 'Using input driver' /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'
[   248.282] (II) Using input driver 'libinput' for 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'
You can explicitly choose an input driver by placing an Xorg configuration snippet like the following in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics.conf
Section "InputClass"
       Identifier "touchpad catchall"
       MatchIsTouchpad "on"
       Driver "libinput"
EndSection
Acceleration
You can adjust acceleration using the command:
$ xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'libinput Accel Speed' 0.5
Two-finger right click
Additionally, if you wish to disable right-clicking so that you use two finger click as your right click, run:
$ xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'libinput Click Method Enabled' 0 1
Tap clicking
If you would like for a tap on the touchpad to be registered as a click, use:
$ xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'libinput Tapping Enabled' 1
Software
Throttling fix
CPU throttling on the P15s is a known issue
but can be easily fixed with undervolting by 100mV.
There are a few ways to fix this. You should only use one of the following as they both attempt to undervolt.
Throttled
To fix this install
throttled
, then
start/enable
throttled.service
.
Note that on kernels 5.9 and newer, the
msr.allow_writes=on
kernel parameter is required to prevent error messages, for example:
/etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="msr.allow_writes=on"
CPU undervolting
Undervolting the CPU/Intel GPU works well with
intel-undervolt
.