Lenovo Yoga 11e Gen 6

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Reason: This page is a work in progress! (Discuss in Talk:Lenovo Yoga 11e Gen 6)
Hardware PCI/USB ID Working?
GPU (Intel) 8086:591c Yes
Wireless 10ec:8852 Yes
Bluetooth 0bda:4852 Yes
Audio 8086:9d71 Yes
TouchPad ??? (Elan) Yes
Touchscreen ??? (Elan) Yes
Webcam 04f2:b616
04f2:b6d9
Yes
TPM - Yes

The Lenovo Yoga 11e (Gen 6) is a 2-in-1 replacement for the Thinkpad X1xx series. Both Chromebook and (originally) Windows-based systems exist. This page (currently) covers the Windows version.

To ensure you have this version, make sure you have access to the dmidecode program and run:

# dmidecode -t system | grep Version
Version: ThinkPad 11e Yoga Gen 6

Installation

EFI booting works without issue.

See #Firmware on how to change UEFI settings, and access the boot menu to load an Arch installation medium. The overall installation is straightforward.

When installing over wireless, the interface is powered off, and the F8 hotkey does not function. The interface can be enabled by running rfkill toggle all

Secure Boot

Disabling Secure Boot is not required to install Arch on this hardware.

EFI/LUKS

Full disk encryption with LUKS is supported. It is significantly easier to get this working using an EFI boot stub rather than GRUB. In addition to various dm-crypt wiki pages, [1] and [2] may be helpful.

Firmware

BIOS is accessible via F2 during system boot. Default settings appear to work fine.

The boot menu is accessible via F12.

Firmware upgrades have not been tested.

Keyboard

No issues. However, the location of the Fn and left-side Ctrl key may annoy some users. There is a BIOS setting to swap the two keys.

Function Keys

Key Visible? 1 Marked? 2 Effect
Fn+Esc No Yes Toggles Fn lock
Fn+F1 Yes3 Yes evtest returns KEY_MUTE
Fn+F2 Yes3 Yes evtest returns KEY_VOLUMEDOWN
Fn+F3 Yes3 Yes evtest returns KEY_VOLUMEUP
Fn+F4 Yes3 Yes (icon: Mic off)
Fn+F5 No Yes (icon: Brightness minus)
Fn+F6 No Yes (icon: Brightness plus)
Fn+F7 No3 Yes (icon: laptop/monitor)
Fn+F8 Yes Yes XF86WLAN 4 (icon: wireless)
Fn+F9 Yes Yes XF86Messenger (icon: speech bubble)
Fn+F10 Yes Yes XF86Go (icon: Telephone up)
Fn+F11 Yes Yes Cancel (icon: Telephone down)
Fn+F12 Yes Yes XF86Favorites (icon: star)
Fn+End Yes Yes Insert
Fn+PrtSc Yes Yes XF86Launch2 (icon: dashed circle with scissors)
Fn+b Yes No Ctrl_R
Fn+i Yes No Insert
Fn+k Yes No Scroll_Lock
Fn+l Yes No "l" (most other Fn+<key> combinations do nothing)
Fn+p Yes No Pause
Fn+s Yes No Alt_R (Screenshot?)
  1. The key is visible to xev and similar tools.
  2. The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function.
  3. xev only returns a KeymapNotify event, but no KeyPress or KeyRelease events. No keycodes are seen by xev.
  4. Unlike some models, Fn+F8 does *not* send an XF86RFKill keypress event. However, it should be possible to bind this to rfkill to achive the same result.

The following xbindkeys configuration may be needed to get volume/mic controls working properly:

"pactl set-sink-mute @DEFAULT_SINK@ toggle"
    m:0x0 + c:121
    XF86AudioMute
"pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5%"
    m:0x0 + c:123
    XF86AudioRaiseVolume
"pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5%"
    m:0x0 + c:122
    XF86AudioLowerVolume
"pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ toggle"
    m:0x0 + c:198
    XF86AudioMicMute

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works, but rfkill may report a "hard blocked" device (tpacpi_bluetooth_sw below).

$ rfkill
ID TYPE      DEVICE                   SOFT      HARD
 0 bluetooth tpacpi_bluetooth_sw unblocked   blocked
 2 wlan      phy0                unblocked unblocked
13 bluetooth hci0                unblocked unblocked

As there is no hardware disable switch on this system (including F8), unblocking this device is not possible. However, the hci0 is the one actually used, so functionality is there. Some tools may not work correctly, as they assume a single Bluetooth device; blueberry for example. bluetuithAUR and blueman both seem to work fine.

Touchpad

Rarely, the touchpad will stop responding after resuming from suspend, but the keyboard works fine. This can be fixed by removing, and re-adding the elan_i2c module:

# modprobe -r elan_i2c
# modprobe elan_i2c

Power Management

Note: Tools like tp_smapi or tpacpi-batAUR do not work with this device.

This laptop comes with an Intel Core m3-8100Y CPU 1.10GHz CPU. The rated frequencies range from 400MHz - 3.4GHz.

The intel_pstate driver is supported, with the performance and powersave governors supported. CPU scaling works with both governors. Behavior is sometimes inconsistent: frequencies stay low even under 100% CPU load, or remain high when the system is generally idle. This behavior is not yet completely understood, but may be similar to Lenovo ThinkPad T480#CPU stuck at minimum frequency

Tip: Immediately after resuming from suspend, the CPU is often throttled, even when using the "performance" governor. Forcing a second suspend/resume (e.g. closing the lid and re-opening) should allow CPU scaling to work properly.

The short script below will flip the governor between "performance" and "powersave" options. With minor modification, it can be bound to one of the unused #Function Keys hotkey as a convenient toggle. It may work on other systems as well.

#!/bin/bash
# This toggles fast/slow mode on the laptop.
# Needs root privs

if [[ $(id -u) -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "Please run as root"
    exit 1
fi

CUR_POLICY=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governor)

echo "Current: $CUR_POLICY"

case "$CUR_POLICY" in
powersave)
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all frequency-set -g performance
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all frequency-set --min 1600MHz
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all set -b 0  # Set the performance/powersave bias
    ;;

performance)
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all frequency-set -g powersave
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all frequency-set --min 400MHz
    /usr/bin/cpupower -c all set -b 6  # Set the performance/powersave bias
    ;;

esac

NEW_POLICY=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_governor)
echo "Current: $NEW_POLICY"

Sensors

As this is a tablet, an accelerometer is installed and supported by iio-sensor-proxy.

The thinkpad-yoga-scripts-gitAUR may be of interest, although it needs to be converted to Python3, and will have to be modified to detect the ELAN devices (instead of WACOM).

Various temperature sensors are supported by lm_sensors.

The hardware includes neither an ambient light sensor, nor a proximity sensors.

See also