Precision 5530 throttles on Fedora 31

EDIT: Original message posted, removing this one.

Hey tclaesson!

Are you on the 1.13 BIOS?  Dell implemented some fixes in that release that were supposed to improve things a good bit. I am also running Fedora 31 on a Precision 5530, and this morning I'm doing quite a bit with the machine (simultaneously running a Borg backup of a 1.6TB filesystem, copying 130GB of VM images from my old system to this laptop, and running a Win10 VM to build a software release for work). I'm definitely seeing a few throttling events in dmesg output, but they are very short (< 1 second) before it reports that things are back to normal temps/speeds.  If you're not on 1.13, give it a shot.  I can't compare to previous releases as this had 1.13 on it when I got it.

Oh, and one thing that was _definitely_ a big issue for me with this laptop is the nouveau driver. Especially if I started to play a movie with VLC (other players weren't impacted) or sometimes when doing heavy work, I'd get "lockups" where the mouse/system would appear to freeze, I couldn't do anything at all and had to wait them out for a few seconds.  Adding "nouveau.modeset=0" to my kernel commandline at boot cleared that up 100% and the laptop ran beautifully. If you haven't disabled the nouveau driver, I'd suggest you try that too because it was a complete turnaround in how well the system behaves.  I did go ahead and install the nVidia driver from RPMFusion and honestly, this thing is running great except for one thing...

So, if I can semi-hijack your question, does suspend work well for you? Mine appears to suspend nicely if I close the lid, but it definitely is leaving either the CPU or GPU active, so the battery continues to drain and if I pick it up after it's been suspended for several hours, the bottom of the laptop is still very warm. It's not a dealbreaker for me as hibernate works perfectly, and resuming from hibernate when on nvme storage is extremely fast, so I'm just doing a full hibernation instead of suspending.  I'm hoping that suspend gets worked out at some point though since I have to enter my LUKS passphrase to resume from hibernate, while sleep only requires I unlock my Gnome session when it wakes.

Regards,

m

To fix the suspend issue, try:

sudo vi /etc/default/grub
Add mem_sleep_default=deep parameter to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
sudo update-grub

I owe you a virtual beer, my googling was somehow not landing me on that info from the kernel docs. You're right and the deep mode does exactly what I need, suspend now works perfectly. Finally feel like I'm past the tweaking/fighting phase of moving onto a new laptop (always seems to be some issue or another).

Thanks!

Thanks for the answer!

I'm on 1.13 and have the version without a discrete GPU. Except for the throttling, which I did not experience on ubuntu, it works perfectly, which is quite something for a linux laptop=)

Is there any documentation of how power/thermal handling is configured on the default Ubuntu?

Best regards!