Lenovo Yoga 920: The overdetailed Fedora / Linux review

by on 2017/11/02 at 6:29 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Having just purchased a Lenovo Yoga 920, I thought I would offer the following (probibly too detailed) review for any interested parties.

History / Background:

This is now the third yoga laptop I have owned. First a yoga 2 pro in 2013, then a yoga 900 in 2015 and now the 920 here in 2017. Lenovo does come out with new models every year, but for me at least they don’t become compelling to jump to until another model, so I have skipped the yoga 3 pro and the 910 models (and all the other side models they have now like the yoga 700). This cycle I seriously considered moving over to a dell xps 13 developer edition, but in the end a few things drove me to the yoga 920: 8th gen cpu (which tuns out to be a pretty big deal, see below), higher screen resolution, and no “nostil cam” (webcam at the bottom of the screen looking up). I use a laptop as my primary machine, so I am sitting at it typing away for many many hours a day, which makes it well worth it to me to get something nice. The dell xps 13 developer still definitely has some advantages, like firmware updates via fwupd seamlessly in Linux instead of needing to keep windows 10 around just to do that.

stack of yoga

Hardware / Specs:

As I usually do, I went for the top of the line model. The 920 is supposed to come in 3 colors and 3 ‘glass’ editions. The colors are “platinum”, “bronze” and “copper” and the glass ones have a gorilla glass overlay over the cover with a design on it: A fancy wave pattern “vibes”, a star wars rebel logo and a star wars empire logo. The copper and star wars models aren’t out yet, the vibes model didn’t seem worth an extra ~$300, and the platinum seemed kind of boring, so I went with the bronze model. It’s a pretty dark coppery bronze and it looks pretty nice.

Specs dump:

  • 16GB memory.
  • 8th gen intel i7 cpu (i7-8550U)
  • 1TB NVMe storage
  • 13.9″ display (3840×2160) with digitizer / touchscreen
  • Lenovo active pen 2 (4096 levels of pressure), included in the bundle
  • 2 usb-c thunderbolt 3 ports. You can charge via either of them. They are both on the left side next to one another
  • 1 headphones/headset jack. I predict I will never ever use this.
  • 1 old USB (on the right side)
  • 1 very very tiny “novo” button to get into the bios or recovery or the like.
  • Fingerprint reader.
  • Touchpad (happily without the sort of chrome border the yoga 900 had)
  • Keyboard with 3 levels of backlight (low, high, off).
  • 720p webcam (at the top of the screen)

The laptop feels very solid and sturdy. It’s a slight bit lighter/thiner/smaller than the 900. The top lid has a slight overhang over the bottom, which actually makes this laptop much easier than the yoga 900 to open. The screen is very lovely… and side bezels are very very small. The top bezel is a little bit wider (to accoodate the webcam I guess) and the bezel on the botton is about an inch or more. The keyboard layout has changed a good deal: They removed the home/end/pageup/pagedown dedicated buttons on the right and lumped them into being Fn arrow keys. They also shrunk the 2 dedicated up/down arrow keys to 1/2 height. The missing pageup/pagedown and small up/down arrows has been anoying to get used to, but otherwise the keyboard actually “feels” much better. It’s just more relaxing to type on than the 900 or the yoga 2 pro. The touchpad is large and responsive. If you press it with CPU intensive tasks you can get the fans to fire up, but they are not any worse than the ones in the 900, and it fires them up seldom in day to day use. The speakers seem a bit better than the 900’s, but if you really want to listen to something, put on headphones, as all laptop speakers are likely to disappoint.

Fedora Install:

With my previous yogas I had just wiped the drive entirely and installed Fedora off the bat. This time I wanted to keep a windows partition around so I could upgrade firmware and the like. This turned out to be a large time sink. 🙂 First I got sidetracked because I assumed I would have to tweak the drive settings in the firmware and change from Intel raid to AHCI. Turns out thats not possible (no options for it) or needed (linux sees the NVMe just fine). Next I ran into windows saying it would only shrink itself by about 50%. I did not want to give it 1/2 of my disk for a glorified firmware updater, so I had to mess around with disabling page files and hibernation and all sorts of things until I could get rid of the “unmoveable” files in the middle of the disk. Finally I managed to do so and shrunk windows down to about 50GiB (still too much, but better than it was).

I grabbed the latest (at the time) Fedora 27 nightly Workstation iso and copied it to a usb drive, then booted from that. Things looked pretty good in some casual testing, so I went ahead and installed Fedora into the free space there and booted up the install to customize/add things and upgrade to Rawhide. On reboot it seems I had no bluetooth or wireless. As was the case for the previous yoga’s I have had, it needed to be added to the ideapad_laptop module. Someone already sent in a patch to do this upstream. A simple blacklisting of the ideapad_laptop module for now gets things working.

What doesn’t fully work:

As noted, for the most part things all just work fine with Fedora. There’s 2 exceptions however:

First, the fingerprint reader. It seems this is a synaptics / validity reader, which is a bit of an odd bird. There is a reverse engineered driver underway, but it seems stalled: https://github.com/nmikhailov/Validity90 It seems it uses encryption talking to the device and synaptics is not being very open about specs either. Oddly, on my 920 I can’t really see the device at all when booted under Fedora. Looking at it when booted under Windows shows the device name.

Second, I had a fair bit of trouble with the wireless card. It’s a “Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac” card and it’s recognized and works, but it has had various problems with stalling out and needing to reconnect, very very slow transfer speeds, hanging and then bursting out again. It seems like it’s a firmware issue: When I removed the -6 firmware (forcing it to use the older -4 one) it seemed a bit better, at least when it disconnected it would (usually) recover, but then I upgraded to the very latest firmware upstream (that is not yet in the linux-firmware package and now it seems pretty solid. Hopefully this will all get sorted out soon by them pushing that new firmware out to linux-firmware.

What does work well:

The new 8th gen CPU(s) really shine here over the yoga 900. You end up with Linux seeing 8 cpus (with HT) and they really make short work of most day to day tasks. I don’t usually build things or compile kernels, so the only time I so far have managed to make it spin up the fans was with thunderbird sorting and filtering a ton of emails or a large dnf update transaction.

Battery life is great. I am going to have to do some real life testing on it, but it’s saying its going to get 10-12 hours or so. My yoga 900 is down to 5-6 now (but the battery is a bit old at this point).

Unknowns:

The Lenovo active pen 2 seems to pair ok with bluetooth, but then it disconnects a short time after. I am not sure if this is a Linux kernel bug or something else going on. Since I don’t care too much about the pen, I figure I can play around with it some more when I get time.

yoga 920 (front, left), yoga 900 (back, rear)

So, overall, I think I will be quite happy with it for a few years. If anyone out there has questions or would like some data about the yoga 920 and Fedora linux that I didn’t include, feel free to drop me an email or pingback and I will update this article over time.

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ansible retired from epel7

by on 2017/10/03 at 10:52 am
Posted In: ansible, fedora, linux

Greetings.

Just a note for anyone looking for ansible in epel7.

It’s been retired there because with the release of RHEL 7.4 it’s now
int the rhel-extras channel.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html-single/7.4_Release_Notes/index.html#technology_previews_red_hat_enterprise_linux_system_roles_powered_by_ansible

Accordingly, you can get ansible now from rhel extras channel, or CentOS
extras repo.

You can also get ansible rpms now from
http://releases.ansible.com/ansible/rpm/

Note that ansible continues to be available from epel6.

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Flock2017: day 4 and home

by on 2017/09/03 at 2:25 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

The last day of Flock started even earlier with a team breakfast. The Fedora Engineering team (which I am on) really only gets together once a year at flock, so we gathered up for a team breakfast to catch up on things and see each other in person. Nice breakfast at the Egg and I.

Then back to the conference where folks were showing off what they did or telling people how their sessions went. I think a number of folks had to depart before this, so I am not sure how well it worked, but it was nice to hear how sessions I was unable to attend went.

Next up was the weekly FESCo meeting. Since most of us were at flock, we gathered in the hotel lobby with laptops and had a IRC meeting while all together. The meeting went pretty quickly and then it was time to catch a ride to the airport. The ride was smooth and trouble free until we got close to the airport. Then an accident made the last few miles take an hour or so. I had time to catch a sandwitch and a beer before my flight (did you know Sam Adams makes a nitro vanilla porter?). Flight was long, but uneventfull and then just the hour or so drive home. Finally got home around midnight local time.

Some final thoughts:

  • I’m not sure the recap works on the last day. Might be better the end of the previous day so everyone is still around?
  • I’m not sure I feel like I got much “do”in done. I definitely got a lot of nice discussions and learned some very nice things, but not sure how much I really did while there. Perhaps it would be good if we want to do that focus again to have workshops/sessions decide up front what they want to do and then report on if they did it or more than that or less than that. Have a concrete goal to work on. It’s so easy to get distracted.
  • I met a number of new folks or people I only knew via IRC, but perhaps we could do something to mix things up more and get people to meet up with new people instead of talking only to old friends. Perhaps some game/badge you can only get by scanning people’s badges or a event where random teams are made for something? Or assign everyone a conference buddy that is the oldest fas account holder with the newest and so on.

Anyhow, I had a great time as always. Many kudos to the flock team and all the attendees! +1 would flock again. 😉

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Flock2017: day 3

by on 2017/09/03 at 2:13 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

Day 3 started again at 8:30, so nice and early.

First up was Mike McGrath giving the “What does Red Hat want?” talk. He had a very interesting (and likely right on the money) concept: Fedora lives in the space right after the very early adopters of something and before the bulk of people start adopting something. In other words, if we aren’t adopting new things, stablizing them a bit and then moving on, we are not in the right place. We don’t want something too soon, it has to be starting to gain adoption, and we also don’t want something thats too stable and going on to the masses because it’s boring. Excellent food for thought.

Next was my workshop (luckily nearby Mikes talk). The room was pretty packed, which was great. I first went over plans for the rest of this year, next year and beyond as I see them. I’d like to see us get more apps in openshift. A lot of the simple ones shouldn’t be hard at all. Then, I’d like to look at leveraging some cloud providers some more. Since we have openshift and apps in it we could look at migrating some of them to cloud providers and reduce our dependency on our hardware in our main datacenter. This would also allow us to spread out more and handle more traffic and load more easily. I’d like to also work more with other open source community infrastructures: in particular CentOS folks, who we already talked to about running our jenkins instance and setting up better integration between pagure and centosci. We share a lot of needs and there’s no reason we can’t also share resources to meet those needs. I’d also like to get more metrics than we have these days (about bwandwith used, cpu consumed, etc… which moving to a cloud provider will give us). There will of course be lots of things where that doesn’t make sense (like the buildsystem/releng machines), but it should make us a lot more flexable.

After going over that I opened things up to questions and ideas. I was hoping for some more crazy off the wall ones, but we did get a number of good ones. We talked jenkins and CI, we talked about metrics and things that do that, monitoring (if we wanted to move away from our current setup), how we might best make use of modules (perhaps have infra specific ones we use for our apps, which makes us not be tied to a specific Fedora release), making docs or other artifacts via openshift, or even reworking how packages are built to use it. Then we broke up to hack on various things and let other folks have some time back if there were things they needed to do.

Then after a bit of hallway/fixing compose issues time, it was lunch again.

After lunch was a general talk on modularity. I think I had a handle on things before this, but it was good to see the current state and there were some great questions from the audience.

After that it was back to the hallway to discuss things with folks and work on composes and other fires.

There was no planned dinner this evening, so went out and had a relaxing dinner with some folks at a local pasta place.

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Flock2017: day 2

by on 2017/09/03 at 1:40 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

Day two of flock started too early for non morning people (8:30am), so I was up around 7am to shower, get some breakfast (at the hotel resturant, it was ok) and get over to the conference rooms.

There were a ton of interesting talks in the morning, but we were also having some rawhide and branched compose issues, so I opted to go to the hallway track and work on that and discuss all kinds of things with all kinds of people. It was great to be able to have full bandwith discussions with someone about something.

Had lunch outside on the deck. It was very nice there, but a bit hot and bright for a bunch of nerds. Lunch discussion was all over the place, including new arm laptop (pinebook) and Fedora builders and how various things were made to laptops and support from various vendors.

Then it was time to rush to the EPEL for the future talk from Smooge. The room was standing room only, so perhaps people are realizing how popular and important EPEL is. Smooge presented some proposals for dealing with various problems in EPEL, but I had to go and get a server that crashed back up and running, so I missed the discussion part of this. Hopefully we will see more discussion in EPEL meetings and on the epel-devel list.

Next up was Ricky’s talk about our recent openshift deployment. He went over how we are doing things and the various caveats and issues around any new tech. The slot was only 30min, but he covered things very well.

Next (in the same room) was Jeremy’s talk about the future of fedmsg. I was a bit confused here I admit (sorry Jeremy!) about the scope and nature of changes. Really it was a bunch of things we could (or decide not to) change. I somehow thought of it as all tied together. I am sure this will also have a bunch more discussion soon and we will see what we all want to do here.

I then went back to the hallway to work on compose issues and some urgent tickets.

Then it was time for the evening event: Wackenhammers arcade. It was a pretty amusing old time arcade with beer and food from a food truck. Got some nice visiting in here with the Fedora kernel team and tons of other folks.

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