40.23 Yoga Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen

20191025

The 3rd generation Thinkpad X1 Yoga from Lenovo was a top end device to support a data scientist on the go. It has a good amount of memory (16GB) and disk (512GB SSD) and a good CPU (i7). It can handle heavy workloads and is able to travel well with good battery life. The touch screen can flip to become a tablet. A BIOS patch was required to fix an issue with battery life. Ubuntu 18.04 was installed by booting from a USB stick with the iso image.

Specifications

Spec Details
Machine: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd, model 20LES0CA28
CPU: 8 x Intel Core i7-8650U CPU @ 1.90GHz
Performance PassMark = 8685, BogoMIPS = 4224 x 8 = 33792
Memory: 16GiB Samsung LPDDR3 Synchronous 2133MHz (0.5 ns)
Network: Intel Wireless 8265 (wlp2s0) and Ethernet 219-LM (enp0s31f6
Disk: NVMe Samsung 512GB
Video: Intel HD Graphics (i915)
Camera: Integrated Camera and IR Camera
Audio: Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio
Touchpad: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
Bluetooth:
Boot: Grub2
Kernel: 4.15.0-72-generic

Issue: No S3 Sleep Mode

This ThinkPad had a major flaw on release by not supporting the classic S3 sleep mode (suspend to RAM—see Section @ref(sleep_modes)), rendering it useless for day to day use. With the lid closed it continued to consume considerable battery and became a backpack heater with a short battery life. After contacting Lenovo they finally released a BIOS update. It was a known issue for at least 8 months during which time patches were made available for a similar laptop.

There were online discussions and workarounds, as well as other ThinkPad BIOS updates to support S3, but not for Yoga for a long time. See, for example, Patch for Yoga and Lenovo Linux Forum: S3 Sleep Mode.

Some commands that had issues before the BIOS update:

$ sudo pm-suspend          # Seems to go into SI01 mode.
$ sudo pm-hibernate        # Blanks momentarily then resumes.


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