Wifi, graphical, boot speed issues on newer AMD thinkpad

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1

Hello,

Requirements:

[ x] I have Searched the forum for my issue and found nothing related or helpful
[x ] I have checked the Resources category (Resources Index)
[ x] I have reviewed the Wiki for relevant information
[ x] I have read the the Release Notes and Errata

OpenMandriva Lx version:

OpenMandriva Lx release 25.06 (ROME) Rolling for znver1

Desktop environment (KDE, LXQT…):

KDE Plasma 6 Wayland

Description of the issue (screenshots if relevant):

So for some background - been running Rome with Plasma 6 x11 on my Thinkpad 11e (intel of course) as a browsing device and great little travel writer and have had zero problems with OM on it which is great.
I’ve decided to move over my main laptop too. This other laptop is a much newer AMD Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 7540u) so I put the Rome 20251022-4247 Znver1 Plasma 6 with Wayland ISO on it.
So far I’ve had a few problems, unlike on the 11e. Under power management I have closing the lid to put the system to sleep under every profile.

  1. There’s a delay of up to 20+ seconds after lid close before it actually enters sleep, unlike maybe 2-3 seconds on the 11e. A mild issue but any clue on why this might be?
  2. Most of the time after waking it will open to the desktop but be completely unresponsive for 30 or so seconds, no keyboard reponse or touchpad or trackpoint (although strangely ¼ of the time, the trackpoint alone will work) then starts responding again. Sometimes it returns to the lock screen to enter the password again after that 30 secs of freezing has passed, once the password is entered then it responds as normal. Once it just stayed unresponsive so I just restarted it and it was fine until the next sleep.
  3. When waking from sleep the wifi is disconnected and doesn’t automatically reconnect (unlike on the 11e). When i try to toggle the wifi switch the system just freezes up without the toggle having even moved position. Sometimes the toggle moves after the freezing moment but then won’t toggle back the other way, and continues to freeze for 15+ secs at a time without the toggle moving or wireless turning back on. On the rare occasion the toggle moves back to the “on” position, it takes minutes to actually start showing the available networks. So from sleep and playing around with this freezing inducing toggle - can be 5 mins to get the wifi to work again. It also does this laggy wifi toggle with freezing from fresh restart too.
  4. Only once this has happened but it was a weird experience: after waking it from sleep overnight, lots of graphical artefacts and glitches once the desktop loaded. A kind of “phantom” window open moved and resized itself then disappeared, 12 (2 x 6) pink squares appeared on the right side of the screen slightly above the midline, and then in the same location what looked like a legacy OpenMandriva logo in blue appeared, stretched to the left, shrunk again and then disappeared. I think I saw a screen tear too but was focussed on the pink squares and old logo (lol)
  5. login is noticeably slower than on the 11e

So to summarise:

  • slow to sleep

  • unresponsive and glitchy after waking from sleep

  • wifi incredibly painful to deal with, I thought it was just sleep related issues but it does it from a fresh startup also

  • strange graphical errors (at least rare)

  • very slow login after password entry considering it’s on a modern hexacore vs an old low wattage dual core that loads fast

    I’m sure there’s a few different root issues here but I’d love some direction or explanation if it’s something well known.
    The wifi issues I’m wondering if it’s the Qualcomm NFA725A module, as I’ve heard Qualcomm can be a PITA with Linux? This is my main gripe, just how I can’t open my laptop from sleep and hope to use it to browse within 5 minutes.
    As for the graphical errors, I’m assuming it’s too driver-y and not really Wayland’s fault? But then I’d still be confused as to the old logo appearing and flittering around.
    After browsing online plenty I’m no clearer on the source of any of this so though I’d come asking, as there’s no parent distro to look for answers from. I love the rolling release, apolitical style and fast package updating of OM so would love to get this laptop as functional as the 11e is.
    Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!

Relevant informations (hardware involved, software version, logs or output…):

Qualcomm NFA725A wireless
Ryzen 5 pro 7540u with radeon 740m

2

Test with x86_64 ISO.

Test with X11.

Also, make sure your BIOS/UEFI/Firmware/whatever they are calling it this week, is up to date.

1 Like
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The suggestions from @zeroability are good things to try to narrow down the cause. If none produce positive results:

I would would strongly recommend not to include so many different issues in one thread. Forum etiquette is one issue per thread, and yes there are multiple reasons for this. One reason for this is that if a problem gets solved in a “catch all” thread with multiple issues other users that encounter the same problem won’t be able to find the solution.

Another recommendation is to not try solve this many issues at once, perhaps pick the two most important and start separate threads for each issue. Also for people to work on issues we need either some way to reproduce the issue or logs. In your case probably we will need logs in order to try to find a cause for the problem.

How to get logs and hardware info for issue reports

Some things in that How To are a bit out of date but it remains a decent beginner guide to gathering logs.

4

@dazzaling The latest ROME (znver1 or Ryzen) isos:

There was just a major upgrade to ROME(rolling) today that may fix some of your issues. So you could either upgrade your current system or try a fresh install. If upgrading current system be sure to upgrade correctly.

sudo dnf dsync --allowerasing --refresh

Using sudo dnf upgrade or up could lead to problems or maybe break your system.

1 Like
5

So as of Friday night/Saturday morning my system was up to date and these problems persisted after…
But now with this latest 1.8GB of goodies, it’s fixed! Not sure if everything on the list is gone, but after more research into the NFA725a, links like below:

-showed that this particular wireless module affects my gen, the previous gen and some dell models in the same way; wireless connectivity problems, graphical freezes and wireless interface crashes. Apparently this is due to the ath11k module used to support Qualcomm in Linux… I guess this is another justified example of people’s mistrust in Qualcomm cards on Linux distros. Shame it’s soldered on in these models.

After this large update, the speed to desktop after password entry on startup is now faster, so it’s possible the wireless interface sourced freezes were responsible for that. Toggling wifi now not freezing and actually disconnects and reconnects in a matter of seconds with no IO freezing. It’s also reconnecting to my wifi after opening the lid/waking from sleep now too. Fantastic when the solution is so easy. Great update :clap: :clap:

Thank you both for your suggestions

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