Power-profiles always switches back to balanced mode after some period of time

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi there,

I can’t force power-profiles-daemon to keep performance mode, it always switches back to balanced. It happens always, only period of time differs. It’s super-annoying while playing FPS games (I play Quake 3 Arena). I’ve been searching the web but the only thing I found is like ‘wait for kernel update’ but it persists since I remember. Can someone advise what to do with it? I didn’t notice temp spikes or something, it reaches 60-65 degrees.

inxi log: http://ix.io/4L6C

dzyndzla@LENOVO-T490-E:~$ powerprofilesctl 
* performance:
    Driver:     platform_profile
    Degraded:   no

  balanced:
    Driver:     platform_profile

  power-saver:
    Driver:     platform_profile

EDIT: it has just switched back to balanced while writing this post :slight_smile:

dzyndzla@LENOVO-T490-E:~$ powerprofilesctl 
  performance:
    Driver:     platform_profile
    Degraded:   no

* balanced:
    Driver:     platform_profile

  power-saver:
    Driver:     platform_profile
2

I take it all back, this page will be more useful: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/power-profiles-daemon#power-profiles-daemon

Especially the Operations on Intel-based machines section.

1 Like
3

Thx for that, I gave up with trying that to solve and just I switched to linux-zen and it works :slight_smile: However, it seems it’s configuration thing as it works on zen.

1 Like
4

Well hey, at least you’re better off than you were before :wink:

5

OK, I’ll reply to myself and spare others wasting time to investigate what’s wrong.

First of all, it’s Lenovo UEFI BIOS issue, limited (for sure) to Lenovo T490 and Lenovo L13 G2 and most probably some other Lenovo platforms are affected as well. Long story short: Lenovo firmware calls irregularly Linux kernel (thinkpad_acpi) to lower platform_profile which results in power-profiles-daemon sticking with balanced profile. There is also separate issue resulting in the same but caused by so called lap mode. Topic is very messy Lenovo side. However, it looks like next bios update (for T490) 1.82 should address that damn problem. More info: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2177962

1 Like