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Underclocking on Lenovo X1 Yoga using Linux Mint 22 (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 days ago by gigachad@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.world

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I set up Linux Mint Cinnamon on a laptop my friend gave me with a broken Windows Install. She gave it back to me and told me it was very slow, YouTube videos were stuttering etc.

Now I have it here for testing and for the first 30 minutes everything went fine. Stress test with s-tui and four 4K YouTube Videos in parallel. Unplugged the power, CPU went down a bit but still everything good.

Then from one moment to the other - everything slowed down, while only watching one YouTube video. I checked s-tui and CPU frequencies are down to ~200MHz while load is pretty heavy. Every click has a lag of multiple seconds, I couldn't even open Shutter to make a screenshot as it is not responding.

Anybody any idea what's going on here? Is Cinnamon too much for this device? I am not much of a hardware guy and also don't understand a lot about operating systems, so please be a bit patient with me ;)

Laptop is Lenovo Yoga X1 3rd Gen i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz x 4 16 GB RAM

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[–] bisby@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

If the CPU clocks are dropping to ~200-300 MHz while the temps are 40-45C (like in the screenshot) then it's not thermal throttling. The clockspeed would go back up when the temps go down. And it would only throttle enough to keep the temps under the desired temp.

I would investigate what performance profile the CPU is using.

There is a tool called cpupower that will list out all the information about the CPU clock states.

I have a Ryzen CPU so the desired governor is going to be different than an Intel laptop, but for example, the output of cpupower frequency-info for me:

analyzing CPU 13:
  driver: amd-pstate-epp
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 13
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 13
  energy performance preference: balance_performance
  hardware limits: 600 MHz - 5.76 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 2.98 GHz and 5.76 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: 4.39 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
  amd-pstate limits:
    Highest Performance: 166. Maximum Frequency: 5.76 GHz.
    Nominal Performance: 124. Nominal Frequency: 4.30 GHz.
    Lowest Non-linear Performance: 86. Lowest Non-linear Frequency: 2.98 GHz.
    Lowest Performance: 18. Lowest Frequency: 600 MHz.
    Preferred Core Support: 1. Preferred Core Ranking: 231.

Which you can see lists the hardware clock range, the current governor's policy frequency range, the actual current CPU frequency, and how it picks different frequency ranges.

I used to use cpupower on an old laptop to force it into the performance governor, because it would not clock up high enough without it. This obviously does negatively affect battery life, but i was plugged in most of the time anyway.

But either way, look into cpupower for determining the governor/power profile and also figuring out which governor you should actually be using.