Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software.
It turns out newer ThinkPads will begin communicating detected hardware damage that can then be parsed by the OS. A new patch to Lenovo’s ThinkPad ACPI open-source driver explains:
“Thinkpads are adding the ability to detect and report hardware damage status. Add new sysfs interface to identify whether hardware damage is detected or not.”
What is the scam? A thing no one asked for that breaks out new component level monitoring… I smell a ‘protect the children’ type malevolence.
USB-C is hot garbage for high power applications though. That pin pitch (tiny copper trace size) and the trace routing with inversion is awful for hardware design. It is like placing a fuse or power resistor between the PCB and connector. It gets hot in those 3mm of a tiny wisp of a wire, and power is super close to the other pins. So it cooks every bit of oily hand grime shoved in with the plug over time. The pin pitch is so terrible, you can’t even order the spec required from the base price level of any board house like PCB way. You have to pay a lot more for a higher precision etching process.
As THE USB-C PD evangelist. I have to say. Fair. Like PD EPD is definitely reaching the limits of the USB-C form factor to me, and data over copper is a dead end at some point too.
Still want ever device I have on it. Though as we scale past the 260 watt range (and I do…) or longer distances (also me) it’s just going to have to be another interface and probably medium for data for the protocol. So far MPO for data and honestly pogo pins for power are the best I’m seeing.
Again for everything thats not a serious power device like well pumps, servers, AC/Heat pump, Power tools, etc or serious data server/client. Its fine, which is seriously impressive.
Rant over I also like the idea of better hardware stats reported to the OS. Its one reason I fell in love with software raid over hardware raid
Random but informative side tangent
Usb-c really sucks for anything but data and small devices
Tangent you say?
I like usb-c as a docking cable for productivity laptops. I don’t really have ports die for users at work amazingly, and the cables somehow rarely need replacement.
We’re talking close to a thousand users for five years now with few issues. I see the support guys give people chargers constantl. Replacing the cable used to dock the laptops with an MST enabled display is very rare, maybe a couple a year. Not at all how I expected.
We’re going anecdotal here, but here’s mine. Not going to out myself, but this used to be a pretty heavy part of my job, we were looking at significantly more than a thousand and our workforce was very mobile so we might have been plugging/unplugging/etc more than y’all.
The increase in replacements on docking stations went up dramatically for us when our main vendor first switched to USB-C docks from the old proprietary connectors they used to have. That had already been rough switching from the rock solid docking stations you would actually sit your laptop on top of. I’m not working in that area anymore, but I have friends that are still there and they say it has improved with the docking stations themselves mostly being reliable, but the USB-C cables are the major point of failure and there is difficulty in sourcing the right USB-C cables without the docking station. Main problem being that even the ones the vendor recommends as potential replacements frequently don’t work at all and if they do don’t tend to hold up. Supposedly, price of cables that they’ve tested to definitely 100% work is close enough to the price of a docking station that they just kind of gave up on fixing it and just treat the entire docking station package as disposable. USB-C standards get crazy y’all.
Vendor also had a few years of seriously flaky USB-C ports on their main enterprise line that did not help. Frequently left us in a situation with piles of computers that were just a brick because there was no way to charge it. Still under warranty, but man, user experience was not great, it made it to the point where people outside of IT were talking about it and that’s always a real bad sign.
