Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9) - ArchWiki

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# Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9)

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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

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## Wireless

Maximum rx/download rate is limited to 10–25 Mbps while tx goes beyond 50 Mbps on a 802.11n connection.

## 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.

## TrackPoint/Keyboard/Trackpad does not work after booting into the desktop or waking up from suspend randomly

A workaround is to turn off all pre-desktop authorization options in the UEFI settings, this is located under Security. Getting to these settings is not documented on the Lenovo website in this model's manual.

Category:

- Lenovo