Tuxedo Pulse 14 Gen 1

Remarks

Fans are very loud because you can not change the fan profile!

This means that the fans will constantly spin at >50% the moment the temperature will rise above ~68 degree Celsius (which is pretty much all the time).
This is the most annoying thing you can imagine and I do not recommend to buy a Tuxedo Pulse 14 because of that.
Tuxedo offers a “Control Center” which can set new fan profiles. But you definitely do not want to install this in dom0 (badly maintained, >64 unfixed vulnerabilities, needs npm).
BIOS settings are ignored in this regard.

Sleep (S3) does not work at the moment likely because of this bug.

HCL

Qubes release 4.1 (R4.1)

Brand: TUXEDO
Model: TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen1
BIOS: N.1.07.A03

Xen: 4.14.3
Kernel: 5.15.14-1

RAM: 32171 Mb

CPU:
AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics
Chipset:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir Root Complex [1022:1630]
VGA:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir [1002:1636] (rev c6) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

Net:
Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a)
Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)

SCSI:

HVM: Active
I/O MMU: Active
HAP/SLAT: Yes
TPM: Device not found
Remapping: yes

Attachments

Qubes-HCL-TUXEDO-TUXEDO_Pulse_14_Gen1-20220220-095426.yml (867 Bytes)

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Thank you @wqpw for your HCL report, which is online now.

Hey, i just got mine and you can find settings in the Bios for low,med,high temp settings with corresponding fan levels to set.
I will need to do some research before doing this though but did you try the Bios settings?
When you say BIOS settings are ignored, you tested manual settings and they do not work when qubes is installed?

ps no idea how i missed your post when i was shopping few weeks ago

@mono Yes, I tested them and unfortunately they did not make a difference for me. Asking the Tuxedo support about it they said I should use the Tuxedo Control Center (which we can’t as Qubes users).

The fan noise does not make the laptop unusable. But if you work in the library you do others a favor if you have some distance between you and them.

If you have bought the Tuxedo notebook bag, don’t use it to lift up the laptop for better ventilation (as shown in the pictures). Simply place it on the table. This will silent the fan noise significantly.

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It is my understanding that thinkfan can be used with all laptops, not just ThinkPads. You have to do some work in identifying your sensors (just follow one of the many tutorials on the web) and setup your own fan profile.

sudo qubes-dom0-update thinkfan

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Finally found a way to make the fan noise problem go away (though hadn’t time to try thinkfan yet).

One can simply run

sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 0
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 2
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 4
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 6
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 8
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 10
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 12
sudo xenpm disable-turbo-mode 14

to disable turbo mode on all CPUs. I haven’t felt any performance penalties yet.
But I can finally watch YouTube videos, run 10+ VMs and do CPU intensive work without believing my laptop will lift off.
@mono You might want to try this.
@sven could you add a note to the HCL?

Also, shouldn’t this be a added to the FAQ? It seems a fairly regular problem for high performance laptops. But it took me until now to find this solution.

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@wqpw wrote:

@sven could you add a note to the HCL?

Done.

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Do you have a source for the high number of vulnerabilities?

I hope you also want to try out using Thinkfan, as disabling turbo mode doesn’t seem a good solution to me.
EDIT: I’m also wondering how many USB controllers it has, as I prefer using multiple USB qubes, one for input devices and one for other USB devices.

This is my lspci output:

> lspci -vvv | grep USB -A 12
00:05.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 10) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
	Subsystem: Red Hat, Inc. QEMU Virtual Machine
	Physical Slot: 5
	Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
	Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
	Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
	Interrupt: pin D routed to IRQ 39
	Region 0: Memory at f2213000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci
	Kernel modules: ehci_pci

00:06.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 (prog-if 30 [XHCI])
	Subsystem: Tongfang Hongkong Limited Device 109f
	Physical Slot: 6
	Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
	Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
	Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 69
	Region 0: Memory at f2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
	Kernel modules: xhci_pci

00:07.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 (prog-if 30 [XHCI])
	Subsystem: Tongfang Hongkong Limited Device 109f
	Physical Slot: 7
	Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
	Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
	Interrupt: pin D routed to IRQ 70
	Region 0: Memory at f2100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
	Capabilities: <access denied>
	Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
	Kernel modules: xhci_pci

I’m not sure about this, but I guess is that the USB-C connector has its own controller. Just as the USB2 has.

Yes.

> git clone https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-control-center.git
> cd tuxedo-control-center/
> npm audit
[...]
  Depends on vulnerable versions of webpack-dev-server
  Depends on vulnerable versions of webpack-subresource-integrity
  node_modules/@angular-devkit/build-angular

43 vulnerabilities (1 low, 12 moderate, 23 high, 7 critical)

Running npm audit fix will break a lot.
Besides, there are several PRs open which update dependencies and others which add features. None of them was merged or reviewed recently (last 2 month). So it’s not that well maintained.

I try to do it next week. Please ping me if I forget it.

Thinkfan fails with this error:
ERROR: TpFanDriver: Initializing fan control in /proc/acpi/ibm/fan: No such file or directory

Could be mistaken since its been a while I looked into it.
But back then I couldn’t control the fans with fancontrol because TUxedo wrote their own driver (GitHub - tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-keyboard: This repository will no longer get any updates as the code here is now part of tuxedo-drivers https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers.) which doesn’t seem to work with it (fans don’t expose any file in proc). I guess the problem with thinkfan is similar or the same.

Yes it looks like it has separate controllers to me too. That is great.

Ah it’s a shame they don’t keep it more up to date. Technically dom0 is an EOL distribution anyway, and it it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t have an internet connection. So installing Tuxedo control center should be fine, but I would not be keen either.

Thanks for trying!

If you haven’t already done it, you might try replacing the CPU thermal paste with a high end one, it might shave of enough degrees to make the fans spin less often or slower. I’ve had good experiences with Arctic Cooling MX in the past, and more recently with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

There are more problems which I’d like to add here:

  • This bug affects the laptop. Which means that it hangs itself from time to time if turbo mode is disabled.
  • The sound is gone sometimes and comes only back randomly.
  • sys-net does not boot correctly every second time for me. I have to reboot the machine at least twice until the network card and ModemManager come up.

@Sven Could you add those points to the HCL if you find them significant enough.

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I’ve changed works from yes to partial and linked to your latest post.

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Did you try the new kernel in the current repository. It’s 5.15.74-2.

I was having the same problems on my thinkpad x13 renoir, minus the sys-net issue. Now I’ve fully updated and use this kernel with no issues for a day now, even when I have turbo off.

Sorry for the late reply.
I did not try the new kernel since I switched to a new laptop.

Hey, may i ask which new laptop and how does it behave?

I only bought the pulse 14 gen 1 for a longer journey last year and rarely had to use it. Traveling again since a few weeks and actually trying to use the pulse but i fear it is not of great design. The keyboard keeps failing me to often with missing keys and the Sound vibrates some part on the left side of the notebook which is really bad for the audio.
Been running the qubes rc on the mini usb port from nvme adapter which works fine enough and without it i boot up 22.04 but Tuxedo control center is not behaving nice, once tomte was enabled my apt was broken, key problem errors. This happened on a fresh install and support tells me to reinstall 22.04 which feels pointless since this is a new system and they should have the knowledge to remedy such problems. Felt like i bought a windows product when i read that. Besides this shouldn’t happen in the first place if the os is supported.
Also would prefer to have the possibility to do any of the tomte changes myself manually then having to trust tuxedo mirrors.
Also wonder about resell value since future updates are behind the original buyers account.

I switched to the Purism Librem 14 but still have some problems I listed here (not the 1Ghz issue anymore though). Other people have no problems as you can see.

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