I've been wanting to post this for a very long time...so glad to be able to share at last some real news. Advance warning - it's a mix of good and bad.

Updated firmware has been released for the P1 Gen 2, P53 and P73. IMPORTANT NOTE: It's available on the Lenovo support website (find the platform, go to downloads and drivers, grab it, unzip it and use fwupdmgr to install the correct .cab files - be careful to get the right one for your BIOS).

It's not on LVFS yet but we will be adding that - I don't have an ETA (I'm asking for it) but I hope it will be soon. I recommend waiting for LVFS to be available - it will make updating easier. For those who are twitchy and choose to go for it let us know how it goes and I'll make sure any feedback gets back to the thermal team.

I've been able to try the P1Gen2 version (I don't have a P53 or P73 available - one of my colleagues will try that but it's a holiday in the US). I'm still doing some early testing myself but I have been able to run a kernel build with no thermal throttling.

The other good new is we have two more platforms getting the update - T490s and X390. I can't share the date for those yet but they are in progress right now.

And so to the bad news...other older platforms are unable to get the update. The reason is related to the thermal firmware that is used on those platforms - it's an older version than the platforms we have updated and is not update-able to use the same mechanism. The thermal team have looked at it and determined it's not feasible.

As pointed out by @notabenem above I have been keeping an eye on Matthew Garrett's reverse engineering of DPTF and helping out where I can. I want to make sure that implementation doesn't impact Lenovo platforms which have the improved thermal firmware but I'm also hoping to find a solution to improve things for those who have platforms that can't be updated. I'll continue to help out there however I can.

All 2020 platforms have support for the newer firmware.

Let me know if any questions. I'm hesitant to post this as I've not been able to do proper testing yet and I'd rather share once it is on LVFS but waiting longer once I got permission to share something seemed wrong at this point.

Side note - when I did the firmware update I had to hit F12 at boot to get the boot menu and select 'Linux-firmware-updater' for the updater to run. Not sure if that's peculiar to my system as it shouldn't be needed. After that the firmware update takes a while so be patient.

Thanks for the update and for following up on this. I know some of us on the forum will be disappointed ... but it looks like at least most 2019 and 2020 laptops will have the fix so that should help many.

I can imagine how it felt to be finally able to post some good news! Thanks.

When you say P1 Gen 2 (and you did not list X1 Gen 2), does that mean that owners of X1 Gen 2 are out of luck (in spite of the similarities between these model)?

Hi, 

what's considered an "old" machine? I have a P1 (gen1) - will there be a firmware upgrade for this model also?

Thanks!

@MarkRHPearson: By older generations, you mean all machines with Kaby Lake-R and older processors, correct? That's really too bad. Any way a toggle could be implemented in BIOS to override the lap sensors/low temp limits?

With a T480 and an X390 in my household, this is mixed news, as you say. But the T480 is fixed by https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

It's great that you're helping Mathew Garrett, however Francesco Palmarini should not be forgotten, it is his work which has fixed the problem for lots of Thinkpad users, although from reddit it doesn't work everywhere, probably where he does not have the hardware to test. Just imagine if lenovo dedicated a few days of developer work to helping his project....

Why are people still posting to this thread asking for workarounds? The problem has been solved three month ago: It was caused by Intel which moved the thermal management from the firmware into kernel- and userspace, but did not provide an API description to implement it on Linux. However, in the meantime new versions of thermald were published. Those enable one to run a laptop without throttling. Note that this is the proper approach to tackle the problem. This is how thermal management was supposed to work. A firmware fix would only be a workaround (i.e. moving back thermal management into the firmware). Understand that there is no longer a need to implement thermal management in firmware. However, support for all features has not been complete, yet. Matthew Garrett started to work on it. If your laptop still suffers from throttling, this is not Lenovos fault, but either caused by thermald not supporting your platform (yet), or - more probable - your inability to install a recent version of thermald (which is open source - in contrast to the firmware solution - and has even been packaged).

TL;DR

Just install thermald, create a thermal-conf.xml and add the "--workaround-enabled" option in thermald.service if necessary, as it was described by fthx about three month ago. 

PS: No I am not connected to Lenovo by any means. I am just a customer and was also affected by this problem. Be assured I would not go easy on Lenovo if this was Lenovos fault, but it is not. It was and is Intels fault.

@Dirdi My MX150 will still freak out if it reaches over 80C, this is done in firmware (I believe). While my CPU has been "fixed", I still have a system that I cannot use to the 94C specified by nvidia. 

same as above. GPU limits thermals.

maxed out my T480s with 2nd SSD and 40GB ram hoping this to be my long term daily driver.

disappointed.