Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9)
| Hardware | PCI/USB ID | Working? |
|---|---|---|
| Video | Yes | |
| Wireless | Partial | |
| Ethernet | Yes | |
| Mobile broadband | Partial | |
| Audio | Yes | |
| TouchPad | Yes | |
| TrackPoint | Yes | |
| Webcam | Yes | |
| Fingerprint reader | Yes | |
| Bluetooth | Yes | |
| NFC | Untested |
Wireless
For 802.11n connections, maximum speeds are limited to about 25Mbps for downloads and 50Mbps for uploads.
Audio
This laptop requires firmware in order for the soundcard to work.
Installing sof-firmware seems to be enough to get audio working. See Advanced Linux Sound Architecture#ALSA firmware for more details.
Video
If you are getting laggy/stuttering UI and mouse movements in your desktop environment add i915.enable_psr=0 to your kernel parameters. However, this can be expensive in terms of power consumption (around 2-3 W), and may be not needed with recent kernels (e.g., 5.14).
Using intel-media-driver provides good graphics performance.
Fingerprint reader
The fingerprint reader works out of the box using fprintd. See Fprint.
IR Camera
See Howdy for logging in with the IR camera. The IR emitters can be enabled with linux-enable-ir-emitterAUR if they do not already work.
Mobile broadband
The laptop allows several different WWAN modules, including: Fibocom L860 (Intel based), Quectel EM120 (Qualcomm based) and Foxconn SDX55 (Qualcomm based). All these modules use a direct PCI connection instead of USB, and they are all integrated through the new "wwan" subsystem: the Qualcomm based ones are supported in the kernel since 5.13, and the Intel based ones since 5.14.
The SDX55 model is fully operational with:
- kernel 5.13, see [1]
- ModemManager 1.16.6, which includes the FCC unlock operation, see [2] and [3]
- Intel VT-D enabled in the laptop bios, see [4].
The EM120 model is fully operation with 5.13 and works after installing and selecting the FCC unlock procedure needed as detailed in Mobile broadband modem#FCC locking.
The L860 model should be usable since 5.14, it is possible that L860 model can be unlocked similarly as EM120 model with correct FCC unlock operation. Please open a new issue in ModemManager if that is the case, see [5].
The FCC unlock operations are required in all these WWAN modules because Lenovo wants to make sure that these modules are exclusively used in the certified Lenovo platforms. Without the FCC unlock, the module would be detected by ModemManager, but it would be impossible to put the modem in "online" mode (RF on). At some point Lenovo will publish a proprietary tool to perform this platform check and run the FCC unlock via the tool; but until that tool is published, there is no known way to FCC unlock the L860; so even if the kernel supports them, they would be unusable.
Since release 1.18.4, the ModemManager daemon no longer automatically performs the FCC unlock procedure by default. [6]
# ln -sft /etc/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d /usr/share/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.available.d/<vid>:<pid>
Replace <vid>:<pid> with a proper value for the device, that is value in the brackets at the end of the line for the modem:
# lspci -nn
For SDX55 that would be:
# ln -sft /etc/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.d /usr/share/ModemManager/fcc-unlock.available.d/105b:e0ab
WWAN module randomly disappears
Any significant network load causes a disconnect of the module. See [7] and [8]
Using kernel 5.17 fixes this problem.
TrackPoint/Keyboard/Trackpad does not work after booting into the desktop
A workaround is to turn off all pre-desktop authorization options in the UEFI settings. This is located under Security > Fingerprint.
Furthermore, sleep state should be set to "Windows and Linux" (modern/S0ix suspend) in UEFI, as the "Linux S3" sleep state was broken before BIOS 1.52. This is located under Config > Power.
Waking up immediately from suspend
This is a problem with the latest Linux kernel. A workaround is to disable both Bluetooth and "Always on USB" from BIOS or to switch to linux-lts. See FS#74387 and the related forum thread for more information.