This reddit post suggests an alternative to fighting the firmware like "lenovo-throttling-fix"/throttled does:
My thermal cap was initially pretty bad:
root:~# rdmsr -f 29:24 -d 0x1a2
30
I checked my current and available thermal policies:
root:~# cat /sys/devices/platform/INT3400:00/uuids/current_uuid
INVALID
root:~# cat /sys/devices/platform/INT3400:00/uuids/available_uuids
3A95C389-E4B8-4629-A526-C52C88626BAE
63BE270F-1C11-48FD-A6F7-3AF253FF3E2D
9E04115A-AE87-4D1C-9500-0F3E340BFE75
The policy name for each uuid can be found in the source code. Why the sysfs interface doesn't just use policy names instead of uuids is a complete mystery to me, since they're doing a table lookup anyway. On my T480 the available policies are apparently ACTIVE, ADAPTIVE_PERFORMANCE, and PASSIVE_2. I have not been able to find any documentation on what these mean. (Edit: These correspond to Intel DPTF policies. It is unclear to me how this relates to intel's DPTF software (which currently supports neither ADAPTIVE_PERFORMANCE nor PASSIVE_2): if the thermal policy is handled in firmware then what purpose does the userspace software have, if the policy is implemented by userspace software than what does this firmware setting do exactly?)
I set the policy to ADAPTIVE_PERFORMANCE and confirmed it changed:
root:~# echo 63BE270F-1C11-48FD-A6F7-3AF253FF3E2D >/sys/devices/platform/INT3400:00/uuids/current_uuid
root:~# cat /sys/devices/platform/INT3400:00/uuids/current_uuid
63BE270F-1C11-48FD-A6F7-3AF253FF3E2D
I located the INT3400 thermal_zone, which in my case is apparently thermal_zone1:
root:~# grep INT3400 /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/type
/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/type:INT3400 Thermal
and enabled it:
root:~# cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/mode
disabled
root:~# echo enabled >/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/mode
root:~# cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/mode
enabled
The result:
root:~# rdmsr -f 29:24 -d 0x1a2
3
