@roliverio , thx for your quick reply!

I do have a dualboot, so flashing the firmware from Windows should be no problem.

But I stuggle to find the older version of the firmware? Where can I find it? Thx!

@ tikatika wrote:

@roliverio , thx for your quick reply!

I do have a dualboot, so flashing the firmware from Windows should be no problem.

But I stuggle to find the older version of the firmware? Where can I find it? Thx!

https://download.lenovo.com/consumer/options/trdockfw3166.exe

egibbs

Hello, I'm the person which openend this thread which I gave the title:

'Thinkapd P1 Gen2 & Thunerbolt 3 Workstation Dock & Linux (Ubuntu): Montor(s) black'.

I apears to me that your discussions about eGPU drifted away from the topic, but might be worth another thread. May be I have just missed the point, then please explain us how this contributes to the issue in the Subject. If not, please make up another thread. You can see already in this thread that some people asks quesions which have been answered above, a clear indication that this thread lost focus.

Thanks in any case for your contributions.

I read through the thread and I would like to ask if there is anything beside  roliverio who has a working setup?

I have triple monitors, I just today got my X1 Xtreme Gen 2 and tried the dock first with Windows - it seemed to be working. Not having read this thread, I upgraded firmware to version 67, and then installed Ubuntu 20.04 (and then 20.10) and Nvidia drivers in versions 450 and 455. I have triple 2560x1440 monitors. I sometime can manage to set them up as I want (one horizontal, two vertical, two connected through DP and one through HDMI), but it reverts after a reboot (or closing/opening the lid or suspend) and boot up is quite unreliable (quite often I would boot up into a black screen).  It is basically unusable.

Does anyone have three monitors some of them vertical, in a working setup?

I think I am going to return the dock and buy a Thunderbolt to Display Port cable and hope daisychaining of two monitors through that will work. But this is suboptimal, I can't believe this works so badly - I have a W530 with a dock in the same setup and it just works, after I set it up once.

Based on my experience, and I have tried a lot of things, Linux does not work well with this docking station if you use more than one monitor, and it does not work very well even for one monitor. Lenovo has released multiple firmware updates for the docking station since I first had this issue, and none of them have improved the situation. Some of the firmware versions were even questionable in Windows. Currently, when using Linux, I bypass the docking station altogether for my displays, and that works fine (which proves that the issue is the docking station). I have used many different flavors of Linux and many versions of the kernel and none of those changes have made it work better. 

@ sup2 wrote:

I read through the thread and I would like to ask if there is anything beside  roliverio who has a working setup?

I have triple monitors, I just today got my X1 Xtreme Gen 2 and tried the dock first with Windows - it seemed to be working. Not having read this thread, I upgraded firmware to version 67, and then installed Ubuntu 20.04 (and then 20.10) and Nvidia drivers in versions 450 and 455. I have triple 2560x1440 monitors. I sometime can manage to set them up as I want (one horizontal, two vertical, two connected through DP and one through HDMI), but it reverts after a reboot (or closing/opening the lid or suspend) and boot up is quite unreliable (quite often I would boot up into a black screen).  It is basically unusable.

Does anyone have three monitors some of them vertical, in a working setup?

I think I am going to return the dock and buy a Thunderbolt to Display Port cable and hope daisychaining of two monitors through that will work. But this is suboptimal, I can' believe this works so badly - I have a W530 with a dock in the same setup and it just works, after I set it up once.

Have you tried using firmware .66? to see if the issue goes away?

@ jdawgnoonan wrote:

Based on my experience, and I have tried a lot of things, Linux does not work well with this docking station if you use more than one monitor, and it does not work very well even for one monitor. Lenovo has released multiple firmware updates for the docking station since I first had this issue, and none of them have improved the situation. Some of the firmware versions were even questionable in Windows. Currently, when using Linux, I bypass the docking station altogether for my displays, and that works fine (which proves that the issue is the docking station). I have used many different flavors of Linux and many versions of the kernel and none of those changes have made it work better. 

I think it happens for both OSs, if you use a sufficiently higher resolution or refresh rate, you can see from multiple replies in this thread that 4k doesn't go to 60hz in multi-monitor setups (or to 1080p@144hz for that matter) when using .67

Of course, if you're using windows, mostly because of the driver, the displays fall back to 1080p@60hz but, if you try to set them to 144hz, you will instantly loose one monitor. (on firmware .67)

I'm working quite well with both at 144hz on firmware .66 on linux, i've even posted my xorg.conf, i think we can all agree that the issue originates on the dock, on how it is assingning bandwith, of course, Xorg is highly dependent on the nvidia driver to "autodetect" safe resolutions and refresh rates, but this can be overrided, also, depending on your Display manager (i use gdm) you'll have to set a default resolution and monitor configuration when the pc is docked and it's lid closed, after that, the desktop manager (i use cinnamon 4.6) has to rely on xrandr to detect displays and set resolutions and orientations, when you open the lid, (and you have it docked) the desktop manager should do the call to xrandr to accomodate for the change.

I'm thinking that wayland-based desktop managers (gnome > 3.32) and KDE plasma will be less reliable and, this is mostly because the nvidia driver, but there's not much that one can do there besides waiting for nvidia to fix most of the wayland issues the driver has. (even if the dock itself has issues)

i cannot use any wayland-based desktop manager for two big reasons:

1) i have legacy x apps that i need to run, and xwayland masks some legacy calls some of these apps need.

2) Steam and friends don't like it.

What does need fixing, from my perspective

On the dock:

• Bandwith assignment
• EDID conformance
• Thunderbold fixes (it seems that sometimes the dock times out while initializing, and, this could be something that happens with some laptops and not all)
• Proper detection of hardware class (this could help a lot if you use an eGPU and would like to boot from it)

On the nvidia driver:

• Wayland fixes
• Faster detection (this could be helped a lot with dock's EDID conformance)

On the linux kernel:

• A better timeout on DP (and this is debatable because it depends a lot on hardware implementation)

I'll be posting any other findings if a new firmware does indeed rollout, and with any new Nvidia linux driver version.

Hi,

Did you ever figure out a resolution to this problem? I have the same issue as that reported by ji12345 on 2019-11-24 and I've tried seemingly everything to resolve it, including rolling back drivers, updating and rolling back dock firmware and bios versions. No luck.

No, the only windows computer at the household is X1 Carbon gen 3 and it does not recognize the dock at all,so no easy way for me to downgrade.