I recently installed openSUSE LEAP-15.3 on a Lenovo Carbon X1 Gen9 (X1C9). After some days of tuning, it is running extremely well.
When I do heavy video rendering with kdenlive or ffmpeg (involving all cores in the 1165G7 CPU on my X1C9) initially the CPU frequency jumps to > 4000 MHz, and the CPU temperature shoots up to 95c. Within a few seconds the CPU frequency is throttled back to about 2400 MHz and the temperature subsequently drops to about 65c. The laptop CPU freq and temperature than stays at this 2400MHz/65c range for as long as it takes the video to be rendered.
I am more than happy with this behaviour. I am not a power user - and this X1C9 is a massive upgrade over my previous much slower ultrabook.
DETAILS on what I have installed:
To sort power issues I ended up upgrading from a default 5.3.18 kernel (that comes by default with openSUSE LEAP-15.3) to a more cutting edge 5.14.11 kernel. That upgrade solved a power shutdown issue. I also had occasional random crash/reboots which I solved by changing specific parameters in the BIOS configuration to work better with openSUSE LEAP-15.3. Further I updated the XWindows environment to newer packages that have bug fixes for the Iris graphics in this X1C9 (for example Mesa from 20.2.4 to 21.2.4).
openSUSE LEAP-15.3 with these updates has been very stable the past week.
As for packages, I have installed:
* tlp-1.3.1-bp153.1.15.noarch
* kernel-default-5.14.11
I have not installed the front end 'tlpui' which is available in an openSUSE LEAP-15.3 community repository (to provide a front end gui for tlp).
There is also a version 1.4.0 of tlp available on github ( https://github.com/linrunner/TLP/releases ) , but given it was released only 24-Sept-2021, it is not yet packaged for openSUSE-15.3. One of the new fetures for 1.4.0 is purportedly: Lenovo laptops: stop threshold at 60% aka "battery conservation mode" . I don't know how relevant that may be for X1C9 - but it reads to be interesting and possibly relevant.
Applications that you mentioned that I have NOT installed are:
thermald-1.6 <<< available for openSUSE-LEAP-15.3 but I have not installed it.
- I read thermald’s purpose is to limit power dissipation before the laptop’s temperature gets critical. The article notes TLP enables power saving features globally to optimize battery power especially in idle and low workload situations. ( https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/installation.html ) . Purportedly (per that article) TLP does not conflict with thermald - however I have not seen the need to install it.
powertop-2.13-2.33 <<<< available on openSUSE LEAP-15.3 but I have not installed it.
- I read this is a linux tool to find out what is using power on a laptop (ie a diagnostic type tool).
throttled-0.9.2 <<< this is available only in a LEAP-15.3 community repository (an it is not packaged with the distribution)
- I read this tool was originally developed to fix Linux CPU throttling issues affecting Lenovo T480 / T480s / X1C6. The CPU package power limit (PL1/2) is forced to a value of 44 W (29 W on battery) and the temperature trip point to 95 'C (85 'C on battery) by overriding default values in MSR and MCHBAR every 5 seconds (30 on battery) to block the Embedded Controller from resetting these values to default. I have seen no need to install this. I think an X1C6 is not an X1C9.
power-profiles-daemon-0.10 <<< This is not packaged for openSUSE LEAP-15.3. I have read ( from https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/installation.html ) that power-profiles-daemon.service prevents TLP from making power saving settings at system startup. Hence even if packaged for LEAP-15.3, I likely would not install it.