frame.work 11th gen Intel

C

cmoerz

After my recent post about the Intel 12th gen, I figured I'll add my experience with the 11th gen. Unfortunately, there's a couple hiccups.
  • First, if you install the most recent BIOS (which you should, for security reasons), you'll need to install x11-drivers/xf86-input-libinput. Otherwise, the touchpad won't work anymore. I did disable PS2 emulation in BIOS. Right mouse button does not work however.
  • If you enable the libinput quirk documented here (bugzilla), the touchpad seems to get worse, unfortunately.
  • The good news - BIOS upgrades are easy: prepare a FAT32 formatted USB media with update files copied to it and you're all set.
  • Also, sleep does not work. You will end up with a blank screen, you might even be able to power off by pushing the power button but that's pretty much it for now. EDIT: sleep works, if you are running the latest BIOS (3.10)
  • drm-kmod works in its 5.10 stage, it appears. Backlight can be configured via /usr/bin/backlight. xbacklight does not seem to work.
  • Also, boot times increase considerably if you ramp it up to the max of 64GB RAM, not just in regards to FreeBSD but also system initialization before the boot screen. So, be patient.
  • Battery life is way better than on 12thgen. I managed to push down to around 5.5W, which will give you 8-12 hours if you go easy. If you're limiting battery loading to i.e. 80%, like I do, you'll be stuck around 4-6 hours, which is alright I guess.
    That's probably no surprise, there being less cores and all. You get less horsepower in the end.
I still switched out the wireless chip. I tried the A210 and while it appears to somewhat work, I got some bogus log messages and switched to an A201 in the aftermath; that one works stable.

I'd still recommend it, if you asked, because you'll be able to upgrade, once Alder Lake is better supported. And 64GB of RAM. You'll run out of CPU long before all that RAM is gobbled up by VMs...
 
cmoerz said:
I'd still recommend it, if you asked, because you'll be able to upgrade, once Alder Lake is better supported. And 64GB of RAM. You'll run out of CPU long before all that RAM is gobbled up by VMs...
Click to expand...

Challenge accepted :)

Anyway, thank you for the report. I was hoping for better but it is what it is. Did you determine what wifi chip was in there originally?
 
cracauer@ said:
what wifi chip was in there originally
Click to expand...
It's an Intel A210. It's a decent chip, I suppose. I didn't do very thorough testing, I have to admit. So YMMV.

I felt very much the same sentiment - hoping for more. It's in a workable state, but not on a ThinkPad level I very much enjoyed the past few years. I still won't go back to ThinkPads, because they're no longer what they used to be.

I believe that the platform is just way more promising in terms of "bang for your buck". It's like I'm finally getting back a level of access to the hardware that was forgotten over the past decade. It's my machine, I can do with it as I please, not as the manufacturer's license dictates. In combination with FreeBSD, this is like a blast from the past. Yeah, it may be rough around the edges but it's for us to conquer it and make it ours.

I mean, just take the 12th gen processors. There's all sorts of new, interesting computer science problems waiting there; for example, take the performance and energy efficient cores, distributing the work load efficiently and depending on battery or A/C use... I wish I had more hours in each day.

And when the next processor generation finally comes, you just swap out a part of the board and deal with that instead of starting all over. By today, I believe every manufacturer has produced notebooks with identical model identification but different parts inside. You buy one and you're either lucky and get i.e. the wireless chip (soldered on), that works or you you don't. I've had enough of this guesswork for my part and gluing and soldering everything shut on top of it.

Sorry for the rant. Your statement just very strongly resonated with me. Just because it's kind of an open platform, it doesn't work any better (yet) is the harsh truth for the moment.
 
I stand corrected: after a few more tests after the BIOS update, it turns out: sleep via zzz now does work! One more reason to do the BIOS update!
 
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