Lenovo ThinkPad T470

This article or section does not follow the Laptop page guidelines.

Reason: Needs a function key section for the 20hd/20he/20jm/20jn models, they all share the same keyboard, only the anniversary edition differs. (Discuss in Talk:Lenovo ThinkPad T470)

Device	PCI/USB ID	Working?
GPU (Intel 620)	`8086:5916`	Yes
GPU (Intel 520)	`8086:1916`	Yes
GPU (NVIDIA)	`10de:134d`	Yes
Ethernet (Intel I219-V)	`8086:2068`	Yes
Ethernet (Intel I219-LM)	`8086:156f`	Yes
Wireless (Intel 8265/8275)	`8086:24fd`	Yes
Wireless (Intel 8260)	`8086:24f3`	Yes
Bluetooth	`8087:0a2b`	Yes
Webcam	`5986:111c`	Yes
IR Camera	`5986:111d`	Yes
TrackPoint		Yes
Touchpad		Yes
Touchscreen	`2386:310e`	Yes
Fingerprint Reader	`138a:0097`	Yes
SD Card Reader	`0bda:0316`	Untested

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

Firmware

The T470 is one of the models supported officially by Lenovo through the fwupd firmware update program.

If you are using a UEFI boot scheme, this is probably the easiest and most officially supported way to keep all the firmware programs updated.

Note: Users have observed a BIOS requirement of "UEFI/Legacy Boot" set to "UEFI Only" and enable Windows UEFI Firmware Update under UEFI BIOS Update Options when using fwupd.

If it does not work for you or if you prefer these methods, it is still possible to do the BIOS update by booting on a specially crafted disk or USB stick. By visiting the downloads section (T470) an ISO can be downloaded and burned to disk which will perform the update from Lenovo. Or extracted and copied on a USB Stick.

Another option that works if you got a CD-ISO from Lenovo is to follow this guide and convert the ISO to an IMG prior to dd-ing it to a USB stick.

Kernel and hardware support

Hardware video acceleration with Kaby Lake seems to work fine via va-api.

As noted in Intel graphics, the xf86-video-intel driver seems to cause more issue than the builtin modesetting Xorg driver. Works fine without the intel driver (on a Skylake configuration).

suspend-resume results in the fan holding at 100% without ever spinning down. This is being tracked on the kernel bugtracker. The issue seems to be resolved by BIOS 1.43.

Fingerprint reader

As of writing this, the fingerprint reader is still under prototype development, but looks like working fine on the T470.

To get the sensor working, it first must be initialized with data. This currently only works with Windows (this is no longer true, see note below). So if you had used the reader before installing Arch, this should work fine. Otherwise install a Windows version in a virtualbox, connect the Validity Sensor over USB(USB 2.0), install the drivers and use it a few times.

Note: This is not yet in the upstream version of libfprint2, but there is a method for enrolling fingerprint data into the Validity Sensors 138a:0097 device only using Linux. The way to do so is here:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/3v1n0/libfprint/-/tree/vfs0090-libfprint2

This uses the package validity-sensors-tools-git^AUR. Now, this may not work, as the fingerprint device may return a data structure that does not match the expected size/length when loading the driver. If the above libfprint driver does not work for you, and you see errors about a length mismatch in the journal, the following fork of the above project has a fix for this:

https://github.com/piotrekzurek/libfprint

With either of these drivers loaded, Windows should no longer be necessary to initialize the Validity Sensors fingerprint reader. Users may want to set up Pacman#Hooks to rebuild this driver whenever the kernel is upgraded.

As soon as this step is completed, the sensor can be used under Linux. Install fprintd and libfprint-vfs009x-git^AUR, then reboot. You can now enroll your fingers with fprintd-enroll.

After setting up the fingerprint sensor is complete, one can use it to login or authenticate for sudo or su.

For login, edit /etc/pam.d/login by adding pam_fprintd.so as sufficient to the top of the auth section:

/etc/pam.d/login

auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so
...

Do the same for sudo with /etc/pam.d/sudo or su with /etc/pam.d/su

For more information visit libfprint and adapt for the vfs0097 package.

Screen backlight

Without the intel driver (xf86-video-intel), neither xbacklight or xrandr brightness control are working. It is possible that, with the good acpi_* kernel parameters, the backlight related keys do their job.

Other workaround exists, such as described on this post or in the wiki acpid#Enabling backlight control. Using the acpilight package as a xbacklight replacement works well. You can also check this repository as a base to add the ACPI rules to call xbacklight when backlight keys are pressed.

Note: The acpilight package is known to allow controlling the ThinkPad keyboard backlight. Similar ACPI rules should allow to toggle it when the keyboard backlight key is pressed.

UEFI boot

After configuring the BIOS setup to allow UEFI boot (either UEFI only or both), it works flawlessly.

For booting directly with EFISTUB the kernel executable (e.g. vmlinuz-linux) may need to be renamed with a .efi extension (e.g. vmlinuz-linux.efi) otherwise it will fail to load.

BIOS GPT boot

Note: I was unable to boot with a GPT + BIOS configuration, and therefore switch to GPT + EFI. However, until another confirmation, it is quite probable that was caused by some bad configuration from my side.

I can confirm that issue. Even with a recent bios (1.52), it does not work.

I had to trick my ThinkPad into UEFI (because my bios is locked, found that method by pure luck). It works by installing the syslinux bootloader on your freshly installed arch (be sure to follow the GPT specific instructions at Syslinux#GUID partition table) and the boot that syslinux with the arch install iso ('Boot existing OS' -> press TAB -> replace hd0 0 with hd1 0). Syslinux should show you an option to boot the Arch Linux installation in UEFI mode. Mount you Arch installation, arch-chroot into it and install GRUB (or your favorite bootloader) for UEFI. That did the trick for me.

You have to create a proper UEFI partition. Have a look at partitioning.

Special buttons

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

Key combination	Scancode	Keycode
`Fn+F11`	`0x49`	`374` `KEY_KEYBOARD`
`Fn+F12`	`0x45`	`364` `KEY_FAVORITES`

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*"

Function keys for model 20K7 25th Anniversary Edition

Special Key	Visible?¹	Marked?²	Effect
`Fn`	Yes	Yes	XF86WakeUp
`Fn+F1`	No	No	No Effect
`Fn+F2`	Yes	Yes	XF86ScreenSaver
`Fn+F3`	Yes	Yes	XF86Battery
`Fn+F4`	Yes	Yes	XF86Sleep
`Fn+F5`	Yes	Yes	XF86TouchpadToggle
`Fn+F6`	Yes	Yes	XF86WebCam
`Fn+F7`	Yes	Yes	XF86Display
`Fn+F8`	Yes	Yes	XF86WLAN
`Fn+F9`	Yes	Yes	XF86Tools
`Fn+F10`	Yes	Yes	XF86Bluetooth
`Fn+F11`	No	Yes	No Effect
`Fn+F12`	Yes	Yes	XF86Favorites
`Fn+Home`	No	Yes	XF86MonBrightnessUp
`Fn+End`	No	Yes	XF86MonBrightnessDown
`Fn+PgUp`	No	Yes	Cycle Keyboard Backlight
`Mute Speaker`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioMute
`Volume Down`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioLowerVolume
`Volume Up`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioRaiseVolume
`Mute Microphone`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioMicMute
`Fn+Left`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioPrev
`Fn+Up`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioStop
`Fn+Down`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioPlay
`Fn+Right`	Yes	Yes	XF86AudioNext
`Menu`	Yes	Yes	Menu
`Back`	Yes	Yes	XF86Back
`Forward`	Yes	Yes	XF86Forward

The key is visible to xev and similar tools
The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function