Linux compatibility with Yoga C930

[bm_rec]

I installed Ubuntu 18.04. What don't work: screen rotation, touchscreen management weird, bass sound, fingerprint, microphone. I'm disappointed Lenovo.

[81290357]

I've installed Manjaro 18 i3 edition on mine. After disabling the ideapad_laptop kernel module everything went smoothly.

What works out of the box:

• graphics
• keyboard (including device specific function keys)
• touchpad
• sleep/hibernate
• lid sensor
• auto-disable keyboard in tablet mode
• sound bar (see also what doesn't work)
• audio jack (not tested with mic)
• bluetooth
• touch/pen (not tested with graphics apps)

What works after minor effort:

• wifi (after black-listing the ideapad_kernel module)

What doesn't work:

• Microphone
• Base/mid speakers (under device)
• Fingerprint reader (looks like linux support will be coming soonish - there's some experimental drivers)

Observations:

• Battery life, with xfce power saver configured, is about 7 hours of continious use (software development activities with screen at 70%)
• laptop stays cool and is mostly very quiet, especially compared to 45W alternatives. It's also good that there are no vents to obstruct under the device.
• Keyboard is relatively plesant to type on, not the quietest and not quite so good as my 2015 MBP, but significatly more usable than the lastest generation of MBP which should no longer be classified as having keyboards (IMO).
• The 4k display will have tearing issues if you run X11 (this will also happen with discrete graphics, it's just how X11 works), but with wayland (if your distribution/window manager supports it) the desktop graphics experience is reasonably smooth.

Call to action!:

It seems that a a bios update will be required to fix the mic and speaker which are not cofigured properly by Lenovo. I've tried the changes suggested earlier in this thread, but they don't work. Of course it is possible for the community to "fix" the sound card issues, but this could only be a hack, really the problem lies with Lenovo who need to fix their bios. I would strongly suggest all owners to report this to Lenovo support, the more people that let them know it's not ok, the more likely they are to do something (it was only the complaints of users about the origional yoga 900, not supporting linux at all, that got Lenovo to issue bios fixes to support linux in the first place).

Conclusion:

Before buying this, I bought an X1 Extreme which I was not happy with and ended up returning, but on the whole I'm very happy with this C930. The teething issues will get resolved in time. For a 15W laptop the performance is better than expected (at least as good as 45W laptops from 3 years ago).

[81290357]

Update:

Since posting the above, I have also tried Gnome and found the following:

• Audio jack with mic works
• Rotation sensor works

So the main issues are still internal sound/mic and fingerprint reader.

There was an updated bios a few days ago, but unforunatly the installer only works from windows and fails when runnning windows on an external drive.

[GRandel]

For some reason after running

sudo modprobe -r ideapad_laptop

on Antegros my wifi starts working but I lose all keyboard functionality. Any ideas?

[emilmih]

i have some issues with Cheese ? do you have to add some different driver . thanks

[81290357]

try rmmod or simply blacklist the module and restart, both worked for me on Antergos

[81290357]

@emilmih I didn't have to use any special drivers for the camera, only the sound has issues.

[doink]

@81290357 I still have a Windows partition alongside Elementary OS and have installed the BIOS update. The changelog did not specifically mention any Linux/speaker/fingerprint reader related fixes, but I installed it anyway. Unless there a specific config I should check/change the bass/mid speakers still aren't working on Linux for me after the BIOS update. 

[81290357]

@doink good to know, thanks. It doesn't seem that lenovo have much interest in fixing these bugs.

[kawb]

Apparently the default suspend mode for the Yoga C930 is s2idle (suspend-to-Idle).

$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep

[s2idle] deep

See: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.20/admin-guide/pm/sleep-states.html

Although suspending to s2idle appears to work, the power consumption while suspended is very high - about 3-4% of battery drain per hour. This will drain the battery in about 24 hours.

After resuming from s2idle there is also some issue causing the CPU to permanently stay in a higher power state, which in turn increases the idle power consumption and reduces the battery life significantly. This issue persists until the computer is rebooted.

The increased power consumption can be seen by using the powertop utility.

Statistics from powertop (at idle) before suspending to s2idle:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 3.30 W

The power consumed was 78.4 J

The estimated remaining time is 16 hours, 59 minutes

Pkg(HW)

C2 (pc2)    8,3%

C3 (pc3)   10,9%

C6 (pc6)    0,2%

C7 (pc7)    0,1%

C8 (pc8)   64,1%

C9 (pc9)    0,0%

C10 (pc10)  0,0%

Statistics from powertop (at idle) after resuming from s2idle:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 4.95 W

The power consumed was 99.5 J

The estimated remaining time is 11 hours, 14 minutes

Pkg(HW)

C2 (pc2)    4,8%

C3 (pc3)   80,0%

C6 (pc6)    0,0%

C7 (pc7)    0,0%

C8 (pc8)    0,0%

C9 (pc9)    0,0%

C10 (pc10)  0,0%

There is also the deep suspend mode available, which is more commonly known as S3 suspend or suspend-to-RAM.

S3 suspend can be enabled by writing deep into /sys/power/mem_sleep:

$ echo deep > /sys/power/mem_sleep

$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep

s2idle [deep]

But when suspending the Yoga C930 with S3 suspend enabled it will result in a hard lockup; the screen turns off, the power button LED stays on, the caps-lock button and the entire the computer is completely unresponsive.

The only way to recover is to press and hold the power button until the LED turns off, then wait for about 10 seconds before attempting to power the computer on again.

This was tested using the latest BIOS (8GCN32WW) and the latest stable Linux kernel (4.20.3).

Lenovo really needs to fix S3 suspend with a BIOS update for the Yoga C930 like they did for the X1 Carbon 6.