Issue tracking?

[fire219]

Is there some central place where outstanding issues are being tracked?

It's something currently being considered, but we need to determine the best way of going about that.

- Using a USB-C cable to connect a T3 Samsung SSD to the one USB-C port doesn't work. `dmesg` does show that a USB device is connected but no device shows up in the file browser. If I connect the drive with a USB-A to USB-C cable to a normal type-A port then the drive shows up correctly

There are known issues with the USB-C port. It's being working on by mrfixit (the person who made the default Debian image)

- If you don't run X11 you can't adjust the screen brightness with the Fn keys from the console

Unfortunately we don't have a module for handling the keyboard Fn keys outside of X11. You should be able to change the backlight brightness manually with: 

Code:

echo <value from 0-255> | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/edp-backlight/brightness

- I've never had a machine with both USB-C and a power plug. If I unintentionally plug in the power cable while charging through USB-C - will this potentially fry the machine? Is this something I need to be watching out for? Or will this even charge my machine faster..? The laptop came with a wallwart, but it'd be nice to just only run off of ubiquitous USB chargers - I don't know if this is advisable

I'll admit that I don't know if it will damage anything. I wouldn't recommend it though, and it won't charge the battery faster.

- In the default OS there is a a frequency regulator in the main panel. I've never seen a menu like this before on any other machine, but it seems potentially quite useful. In particular I'd like to do performance benchmarks of some software I'm working on and I'd like to avoid external factors like thermal throttling, "turbo" modes and whatnot, so running slower but consistent would be very useful for getting repeatable results- however there is not a lot of info in the Help menu. The different profiles don't have any explanation and I'm unclear on what will happen if I manually select a high frequency. Will this risk overheating and damaging the computer?

The "profiles" in that regulator widget are standard Linux kernel "governors". You could look them up if you want exact details, but basically:

-  "on-demand" is the best all around (performance when its needed, low power when its not)
- "performance" runs all the cores at full clock speed all the time. It won't damage anything, but the PBP will get noticeably hotter.
- "powersave" runs all the cores at their lowest clock speed. The benefits and downsides of this should be obvious.

There is also the whole "big-little" architecture and I'm not sure how scheduling happens for that - is there some place I can find more info? Maybe a way to temporarily disable the little cores when running certain jobs?

I'm not sure how the scheduling happens either. It depends on how the kernel is set up. There should be a way to disable the little cores but I'm not sure how -- and I wouldn't recommend it either. At worst, it messes with benchmarks. But the little cores are there for a reason: they consume a lot less power than the big cores, when you don't need full performance!