Booting Debian on ThinkPad X13 AMD

Running new hardware is always fun. The problems are endless. The solutions not so much.

So I've got a brand new ThinkPad X13 AMD. It features an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVME SSD. The internal type identifier is 20UF. It runs the latest firmware as of today with version 1.09.

So far I found two problems with it:

• It refuses to boot my Debian image with Secure Boot enabled.
• It produces ACPI errors on every key press on the internal keyboard.

Disable Secure Boot

The system silently fails to boot a signed shim and grub from an USB thumb drive. I used on of the Debian Cloud images, which should properly work in this setup and do on my other systems.

The only fix I found was to disable Secure Boot alltogether.

Select Linux in firmware

Running a Linux 5.8 with default firmware setting produces ACPI errors on each key press.

ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol [\_SB.PCI0.GPP3], AE_NOT_FOUND (20200528/psargs-330)
ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.GPIO._EVT due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200528/psparse-529)

This can be "fixed" by setting a strategic setting inside the firmware:
Config > Power > Sleep State to Linux