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ThinkPad P72 progress update



Fellow SILUG-ers,

In late November I invested (heavily) in a Lenovo ThinkPad P72 mobile
workstation to replace my deceased ThinkPad W700. Like the W700, the P72
came full of leading (bleeding?) edge features and nuggets, among which
are a pair of 2T NVMe SSDs connected to an Intel RST RAID controller, an
NVIDIA Quadro P5200 video, and a 4K display.

My original plan was to do a forensic bare metal backup of the factory
installed Windows 10 Professional, split the RAID1 configuration, install
F29 on the first SSD and import Windows 10 to a VM running under F29. As
they say, even the best plans go right out the window five minutes after
the battle begins.

As I reported earlier, I ran into trouble almost immediately. The Intel
RST RAID controller cannot be accessed by any commonly known backup
software. After much research, I found that the BIOS supports two access
modes for the Intel RST chip: native RST and an AHCI/SATA emulation mode.
Linux can't see the Windows-only RST mode at all. Linux can see SATA with
mdadm, but there is no common ground between the two. Fedora really really
wants to use mdadm. So if I want to installed a native F29 on this system,
I have to give it a SATA hard drive. The RAID1 and RST mode must go.

Bear in mind that when I flip that switch in the BIOS, the factory
installed Windows 10 Professional will vaporize and I will be left with
two 2T NVMe SSDs running in emulated SATA mode. This will certainly be
slower than the native NVMe interface, but I really have no other choice.

To see if F29 would even run on the P72, I tried booting it from a DVD
containing the F29 Workstation ISO image. That failed. I made a thumb
drive with the same ISO image, and that too failed. In each case I got a
black screen after the GNOME display manager started. Research said a
change was needed in a BIOS Display setting for the P5200 chip. I had to
change a [HYBRID] Windows-only speed hack over to [DISCRETE] so F29 could
actually see the true PCI interface.

I hit F10 save and rebooted into runlevel 3, which it (miraculously?) just
did. For 126 seconds. Then it threw an error which I promptly transcribed
and sent off to the thinkpad_acpi maintainer:

===================================

I got this error on my new Lenovo ThinkPad P72 mobile workstation just 126
seconds after booting the Fedora 29 Workstation live DVD from a thumb
drive in runlevel 3 (text only). This is a manual transcription of the
screen output:

Fedora 29 (Workstation Edition)
Kernel 4.10.16-300.fc29.x86_64 on an x86_64 (tty1)

localhost login: [    41.103546] L1TF CPU bug present and SMT on, data
leak possible. See CVE-2018-3646 and
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/l1tf.html for details
root
[root@localhost ~]# ls -al
total 48
dr-xr-x---.  3 root root  4096 Feb  8 22:31 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 18 root root  4096 Feb  8 22:31 ..
-rw-------.  1 root root 12502 Oct 24 20:03 anaconda-ks.cfg
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    18 Jul 15 2010  .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--.  1 root rot    176 Jul 15 2010  .bash_profile
-rw r--r--.  1 root root   176 Jul 15 2010  .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root root  4096 Feb  8 22:31 .cache
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root   100 Jul 15 2010  .cshrc
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root   129 Jul 15 2010  .tchrc
[root@localhost ~]# cd /home/liveuser
[root@localhost liveuser]# ls -al
drwx------.  4 liveuser liveuser 4096 Feb  8 22:31 .
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root     root     4096 Feb  8 22:31 ..
-rw-r--r--.  1 liveuser liveuser   10 Oct  8 09:41 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--.  1 liveuser liveuser   10 Oct  8 09:41 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--.  1 liveuser liveuser   10 Oct  8 09:41 .bashrc
dr-xr-xr-x.  3 liveuser liveuser 4096 Feb  8 22:31 .config
dr-xr-xr-x.  4 liveuser liveuser 4096 Oct 24 19:50 .mozilla
[root@localhost liveuser]# df -h
Filesystem           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs              32G     0   32G   0T /dev
tmpfs                 32G  4.0K   32G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 32G  1.3M   32G   1% /run
tmpfs                 32G     0   32G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1            1.0G  1.0G     0 100% /run/initramfs/live
/dev/mapper/live-rw  6.4G  5.2G  1.2G  83% /
tmpfs                 32G  4.0K   32G   1% /tmp
vartmp                32G     0   32G   0% /var/tmp
tmpfs                6.3G     0  6.3G   0% /run/user/0
[root@localhost liveuser]# [  126.960811] thinkpad_acpi: unhandled HKEY
event 0x6031
[  126.960872] thinkpad_acpi: please report the conditions when this event
happened to ibm-acpi-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

===================================

I haven't broken the RAID yet because I still have some serious backing up
to do. Once I make the change from HYBRID to DESCRETE, all is lost and I'm
at square zero.

Stay tuned.

--Doc
Robert G. (Doc) Savage
Fairview Heights, IL

"Perfection is the enemy of good enough."
          -- Admiral of the Fleet Sergei G. Gorshkov

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