Gnomespace | Xiaomi Book Pro 16 2022

GNOME/Wayland environment for CachyOS on a hybrid-graphics laptop with a 4K OLED panel — plus a full hardware investigation log for a machine whose vendor firmware fights back.

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🔍 Did you land here searching for one of these?

If your NVIDIA laptop GPU is stuck around 16 W instead of its rated 35 W, games run at ~17 FPS with heavy input lag, nvidia-smi reports SW Power Cap throttling, and your kernel log looks like this:

NVRM: GPU0 ... PlatformRequestHandler failed to get target temp from SBIOS
NVRM: GPU0 ... PlatformRequestHandler failed to get platform power mode from SBIOS
      [NV_ERR_INVALID_DATA] (0x00000025)
nvidia-powerd: DC power limits table is not supported
nvidia-powerd: Client (presumably SBIOS) has requested to disable Dynamic Boost DC controller
ucsi_acpi USBC000:00: bogus connector number in CCI: 2

…then you have the same problem this repo documents, and there is a working workaround: debug/gpu/ — start with OPERATIONS.md for the runbook, or SOLUTION.md for the mechanism.

Short version: the platform↔GPU power negotiation channel is broken because the SBIOS returns garbage, so the driver silently caps itself. The fix injects a runtime SSDT exposing an \NVST method and drives the NVPCF handshake manually (NVST 3 → wait → NVST 1) under GPU load, re-armed on every login by a systemd user unit. Affected hardware here is a Xiaomi Book Pro 16 2022 with an RTX 2050, BIOS XMAAD6B0P1717 (2022-12-13), but the mechanism should apply to any laptop whose SBIOS breaks NVPCF.

The same broken ACPI also costs this machine its battery charge-limit interface — see debug/battery/.

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💻 Hardware Specs

• Device: Xiaomi Book Pro 16 2022
• CPU: Intel Core i7-1260P (12th Gen, Alder Lake-P)
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2050 Mobile + Intel Iris Xe (hybrid, nvidia-prime)
• Display: 4K OLED
• Storage: Kingston FURY Renegade 2 TB, btrfs + zstd
• Kernel: linux-cachyos 7.1 (with linux-cachyos-lts as fallback)

🛠 Tech Stack

• DE: GNOME Shell 50.3 on Wayland
• Shell: Fish 🐟 + Starship
• Terminal: Ghostty
• AUR Helper: Paru
• Power Management: Gamemode + custom GPU clock locking
• VPN: Mullvad (with split tunneling for Steam and Spotify)

📁 Structure

• fish/ — shell config, fnm/pnpm paths, fastfetch greeting.
• ghostty/, fontconfig/, gtk-3.0/, btop/ — terminal and UI styling.
• fastfetch/ — fetch config and the banner image above.
• scripts/ — utility scripts. gamemode-tweaks.sh locks GPU clocks during games; it is chattr +i locked because sudoers points at it directly.
• systemd/user/ — nvpcf-unlock.service, the boot-time workaround that keeps the GPU from being throttled. Without it the machine loses ~70% of its GPU performance.
• autostart/, monitors.xml, user-dirs.dirs, xdg-terminals.list — session bits that are tedious to recreate by hand.
• gnome-settings.dconf — full dconf dump. This is where the actual GNOME look and behaviour lives; the dotfiles alone won't restore it.
• pkglist.txt / pkglist-aur.txt — explicitly installed packages.
• debug/ — see below.

🔬 debug/ — hardware investigations

Xiaomi shipped broken ACPI tables and never updated the BIOS (XMAAD6B0P1717, dated 2022-12-13). Several subsystems misbehave as a result, and each one has its own investigation folder with documentation, tooling and logs. Start at debug/README.md.

Branch	Problem	Status
debug/gpu/	RTX 2050 throttled to 16 W instead of 35 W	solved via a runtime SSDT workaround
debug/battery/	39% wear after ~2.5 years, no charge limit available	open
debug/nvme/	130k power cycles reported at 6k power-on hours	closed — counter is fine

Each branch keeps its own CSV log and a *check.sh tool. Negative results and dead ends are kept on purpose — see the conventions in debug/README.md.

🚀 Quick Start

1. Clone into ~/.config: Back up your existing .config first.

   git clone git@github.com:afterallspace/gnome.git ~/.config

2. Restore packages:

   sudo pacman -S --needed - < <(cut -d' ' -f1 ~/.config/pkglist.txt)

   AUR packages are listed separately in pkglist-aur.txt and need paru.

3. Restore GNOME settings:

   dconf load / < ~/.config/gnome-settings.dconf

4. Re-arm the GPU workaround — the service alone is not enough, it needs a root helper and a sudoers rule. Full procedure in debug/gpu/OPERATIONS.md:

   systemctl --user enable --now nvpcf-unlock.service

⚠ Machine-specific gotchas

Every one of these cost hours. Full list in debug/CLAUDE.md.

• modprobe.d does not work for modules loaded from initramfs (nvidia, nvme_core) — use the kernel command line via LINUX_OPTIONS in /etc/sdboot-manage.conf, then sudo sdboot-manage gen.
• dmesg is restricted (dmesg_restrict=1) — use journalctl -k.
• nvidia-smi -pl is blocked in the vBIOS.
• Recursive grep -r over /sys will peg every core for a very long time.