Funny timing, I just spent a while investigating this on my FW16 with Debian testing. Sounds like it took me way longer to narrow down than it did for you.
Framework 16, Ryzen 9 7940HS, Framework Power Adapter.
I had the exact same symptoms: extremely long boot times and once booted it was so slow as to be practically unusable. Simply moving my mouse cursor around would result in the system hitting nearly one hundred percent CPU.
What I found was that when the power supply is connected through two out of three docks/hubs I tried, the CPU basically refused to ever reach higher frequencies. It would fluctuate between 400MHz and 544MHz on all cores, but never any higher. cpupower showed that the governor was still seeing frequencies up to 5.58GHz available, but the system never reached that.
All the programs looked like they were using more CPU because they were running on a 400MHz CPU, so they needed to use more CPU to get things done.
As soon as I unplug power from the dock, everything goes back to normal. (With the dock running off of the FW’s battery.)
I repeated this on ports 1, 2, and 4.
I was able to get the system usable again by plugging the dock into port 1 and the power adapter into port 4 instead of powering the laptop through the dock.
I’m not really sure where the bug is here. I’m guessing putting the dock in the middle is messing with some of the power negotiation. However, I’m not sure why the laptop locks the CPU to low frequency rather than just doing what it would normally do and reporting that it’s connected to power but still discharging.
I’m going to try a different power supply. Also going to try booting into Windows when I get a chance to see if I can recreate it there.
EDIT:
- Grabbed the charger for my wife’s Thinkpad (20V/65W). No issues when plugged into the dock.
- Booted into Windows. Looks like the exact same problem. As soon as I connect the Framework power adapter to the dock, Task Manager’s Performance tab shows the CPU frequency immediately dropping and then staying below 1GHz.
- Tried ectool to see if I could get any information on what’s going on here. Might’ve done something wrong, but just looks like the FW embedded controller doesn’t support anything that might help me track this down. If anyone’s got any pointers, please feel free.
And just for the sake of completeness–the docks/hubs that exhibited this were the Anker 555 and Cable Matters 201308-BLK (8-in-1 40Gbps USB4 Dual Displayport), both tested with the Framework power supply. The one that didn’t give me any problems was an AV Access iDock C10 KVM which comes with its own power supply.