Lenovo ThinkPad T480

This article covers the installation and configuration of Arch Linux on a Lenovo T480 laptop. Everything seems to work pretty much out the box.

Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
GPU (Intel)	`8086:5917`	Yes
GPU (NVIDIA)	`10de:1d10`	Yes
Ethernet	`8086:15d7`	Yes
Wireless	`8086:24fd`	Yes
Audio	`8086:9d71`	Yes
TrackPoint	PS/2	Yes
Touchpad	`001d:06cb`	Yes
Webcam	`0c45:6366`	Yes
Bluetooth		Yes
Smart Card reader	`058f:9540`	Yes
Mobile internet		Yes
Mobile internet		¹
Fingerprint Sensor		Yes²
No working Linux driver for Fibocom L850-GL. See this thread and this thread for more info. Supported on Kernel 5.8.1 with libfprint-tod-git. See this Reddit thread for more info.

For a general overview of laptop-related articles and recommendations, see Laptop.

TrackPoint and Touchpad

TrackPoint and Touchpad work out of the box and do not seem to have the same issues as the X1 Carbon Gen 6.

However one could benefit from having greatly increased event reporting frequency by enabling psmouse kernel module option .

This can be made permanent with:

For two-finger scrolling activity this gives a boost from 40 Hz to 135 Hz on average which is more than threefold increase. This boost greatly contributes to the Desktop environment scrolling performance and smoothness.

() may be of use to find out how frequently Touchpad reports events. For example after enabling said option:

Power management/Throttling issues

Due to missing Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) support for Linux, a feature which should detect whether the laptop is used on a desk or on the lap so it can throttle the CPU in the latter case to reduce the temperature is not working and the CPU is always throttled. An Lenovo employee explained the situation and the solution Lenovo is building in a PDF posted in their forum (archive.org backup of the PDF). The firmware and EFI fixes have been released for a different model and Lenovo has recognized that the T480 is affected, so there is hope the T480 will get the fix too.

An interim fix is (Github).

Also see:

Firmware

Lenovo provides firmware updates for this device through the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

Available updates and changelogs can be found on the LVFS website. These include security patches for the Intel Management Engine and the system firmware.

The updates can be installed using fwupd.

Screen backlight

Without the intel driver (), neither xbacklight or xrandr brightness control are working.

However, the package acpilight provides a drop-in replacement for xbacklight. Apart from installing the package (which conflicts with ), you have to add your user to the group and add the following udev rule:

This allows you to control the backlight with xbacklight command provided by acpilight, as well as control the various LEDs on your T480.

Encryption and keyboard

Assuming encrypted installation, during boot process you are prompted to enter password to decrypt disk. In some cases you may not be able to enter password, because at this time keyboard driver is not loaded yet.

To fix this, add the atkbd module to the mkinitcpio array:

Regenerate the initramfs afterwards.

Special buttons

Some special buttons are not supported by X server due to keycode number limit.

Key combination	Scancode	Keycode

	`0x45`

You can remap unsupported keys using udev hwdb:

/etc/udev/hwdb.d/90-thinkpad-keyboard.hwdb

evdev:name:ThinkPad Extra Buttons:dmi:bvn*:bvr*:bd*:svnLENOVO*:pn*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_45=prog1
 KEYBOARD_KEY_49=prog2

Update hwdb after editing the rule.

# udevadm hwdb --update
# udevadm trigger --sysname-match="event*"

Their names will be "XF86Launch2" (KEY_KEYBOARD) and "XF86Launch1" (KEY_FAVORITES)

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