Fixing heat/fan issue on Thinkpad t490s running CentOS 8/Stream
It's usually always a good thing to receive a newer laptop, as usually that means shiny new hardware, better performances and also better battery life. I was really pleased with previous Lenovo Thinkpad t460s and so the normal choice was its successor, also because default model following company standard, and so the t490s
When I received the laptop, I was a little bit surprized (had no real time to review/analyze in advance) by some choices :
- No SD card reader anymore (useful when having to "dd" some image for armhfp tests)
- Old docking style is gone and you have to connect through usb-c/thunderbolt
- Embedded gigabit ethernet in the t490s (Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (6) I219-LM (rev 30)) isn't used at all when docked, but going through usb-net device
Installing CentOS Stream (so running kernel 4.18.0-147.6.el8.x86_64 when writing this post) was a breeze, after I turned on SecureBoot (useful also because you can also use fwupd to get LVFS firmware updates automagically as I did for my t460s)
But quickly I realized a huge difference between my previous t460s and the new t490s : heat/temperature and so fan usage. To a point where it was …