Patches

Information on patches for existing Thinkpad tools and drivers or to adopt others to work with Thinkpads.

Kernel patches

Dothan CPUs and speedstep

If you have a new Dothan CPU (Centrino with 2Megs of L2 cache) and kernel 2.6.8, then you will need to apply this patch and this one, too. Otherwise speedstep will not work on your Dothan CPU.

ipw2100 and C3

On some Thinkpads there is a problem with the ipw2100 wireless LAN driver when C3 is enabled. It results in frequent firmware restarts due to data corruption. If you see this problem frequently and want to disable C3 but still use C2 and the thermal management, you can apply this patch to the file /usr/src/linux/drivers/acpi/processor.c.
APPLY THIS PATCH ONLY IF YOUR SYSLOG REPORTS DRIVER RESTARTS AND FIRMWARE RELOADS ALL THE TIME!
This patch causes slightly shorter battery life.

If you don't want to patch your kernel, sacrifice C3 entirely and/or use WLAN mainly on AC then you can alternatively add rules to modules.conf to unload the acpi processor module as long as ipw2100 is loaded.