Custom Fedora OCI images for Framework laptops

Quick update, we are experimenting with tuned in our :testing images:

I just finished a trip with mine and I prefer it to the TLP setup on my Intel Framework 13. Battery lasts just as long but it doesn’t feel so crippled performance-wise on battery. I have not done hard science on this.

We now have and updated PPD and tuned in images so switching back and forth is a clan reboot. What I don’t have is the time to test them thoroughly, so if any of you have any time to investigate performance between the two (on AMD and Intel) then that’d be awesome. Thanks!

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I had the opposite experience. Tuned is simply another profile style power optimizer that attempts to figure out what the user wants. You probaly turned turbo off on battery in TLP and well tuned wants to use turbo “where needed” to enhance user experience. Probably why in your instance you are finding it more responsive, just wait until you hit the wrong workload on battery and it keeps kicking turbo in to give you the wanted experience. One of my big issues with tuned is that 1) at the time I tested it there was no easy way to turn turbo off (or I could not find the documentation), and 2) difficult to make it event driven. I don’t want to have to remember to change my profile, it should do it automatically. Primarily plugged in vs battery, docked vs not.

t has potential, but I will wait until it is actually ready.

I’m just using the built in GNOME widget (which drives tuned) to match what I want and it seems to be working fine.

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Plans for Fedora 40!

Hey ya’ll, we’ve been reorganizing and cleaning up all the Universal Blue images and I thought I’d give everyone a quick update for the Fedora 40 release.

Just about everything you need for the Framework 13 and 16 is in Fedora, there’s really no need to have a full image just for Framework hardware as it’s just passing a karg and a few minor tweaks. Therefore we have decided to sunset the dedicated Framework images and instead have Bazzite and Bluefin support the necessary tweaks to have those images working ootb on the 13 and 16.

The biggest change is we’re switching to tuned for power management. Fedora has plans to switch to this at some point. We switched to this about half way through the F39 cycle and it’s been excellent and allows for having tons of profiles and tweaks. All the desktop GUI stuff is ported over to use it so you shouldn’t notice a UX difference in the power selector thing:

image

  • Bluefin and Aurora(WIP) are more suitable for generic desktop use and work great on the 13 and 16.
  • Bazzite will be the go to image if you want to game on a Framework 16
  • Both include ROCm out of the box so things like ollama and pytorch should work out of the box, still investigating these.

If you’re looking for a more vanilla Fedora experience, you can use a base image - these will not include tuned. The GNOME ones come with the latest power-profiles-daemon and that has all the right AMD patches, they work great.

Rebasing to a new image

We will stop publishing the framework images sometime at the end of the month when Fedora 40 is released. If you’re on an existing framework image do an rpm-ostree status and look for this line with framework in it:

ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-framework:latest - this tells you the current image that you are on.

Whatever image you are on you will need to rebase to the non-framework version.

rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-main:latest

Note that :latest will put you on F39 and will put you on F40 when it comes out, so if you want to control when to do the major update you can use :39 or :40 if you prefer to do it manually.

Note that we’re in the process of enabling F40 builds, so depending on the image a rebase to F40 now might not work, so just putting this up now in preparation for release. Thanks and if you have any questions feel free to ask!

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Tuned doesn’t have support for amdgpu like PPD does. For whatever reason upstream hasn’t merged it. Please don’t switch until this is merged.

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Gotcha, we can slipstream the patch in now and then drop it when it’s merged, thanks!

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@Jorge_Castro Bazzite website down ?

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Misspelled the URL, fixed, thanks!

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Just wanted to say I’ve been on Fedora Atomic/Silverblue since I got my 1st gen Framework, and switching to Bluefin made both video playback and battery-life/heat a lot better. Thank you very much for the build!

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PPD again is ahead of tuned. PPD 0.21 now handles battery for AMD pstate differently than on AC for more efficiency.

Here are all the pull requests tracking everything.

My honest opinion is you are “jumping the gun” moving over ahead of regular Fedora. I intend to push back on regular Fedora’s move too until these are merged. Otherwise you will be asking for battery life regressions.

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Understood, I’ll look at switching back before release.

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Ok all switched, we should be good to go for F40!

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Im reading already for a certain time what youre doing with Bluefin and Ublue…
but when i got my F13 AMD a few weeks ago i just installed Fedora Atomic Gnome 39, aka Silverblue.
Im very happy with the experience. Maybe the battery could be a little better, but from reviews and such, the battery life is not the greatest on the market…

What pros and cons it would have when i would switch to Bluefin when it comes out with F40?
And is there a way of switching withiut needing to completely reinstall?

Just rebase is my understanding

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Quick update, we’ve released everything today, however, the magical “out of the box” Framework bits will be landing later this week (hardware shipping delay) and I’ll update then. Thanks!

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W00t! Thanks @Jorge_Castro

Answer is (if I am not mistaken @Jorge_Castro)

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Really, really amazing work @Jorge_Castro ! I am also new one stumbling upon Bluefin (well, Aurora-DX will be my way to go) and I am truly impressed by the speed and maturity of things in such a short span (at least from what I can read - will get my FW16 next week and will be finally able to play).

Just want to make sure: Does it mean that possibly next week I will be able to go to getaurora.dev, pick Framework / AMD / Developer-Yes and I will get aurora-dx-framework.iso? Or should I get it under Bluefin Github packages or elsewhere?

Also please advise what is the preferred way to give feedback/contribute - is it via Github issues?

It won’t be a specific image (we don’t need those anymore thanks to Fedora/Framework’s work in getting all this stuff working upstream!) - so our focus will be on the the little nitpicks, our goal is zero extra config, we’ll have more details next week as we land things.

Feel free to file issues in the github repo for now and we’ll take a look, thanks!

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I really enjoyed watching the walkthrough with Chris Short, and I’ll probably go ahead and run it for at least like a week or so.

I’ve thought of running Silverblue/Kinoite for a bit, but I love that Bluefin/Aurora sets up the base (codecs etc) just out of the box.

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