Analyzing Fedora's Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake

As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Linux benchmarks and the cause/workaround for Fedora's slower performance on the Intel Panther Lake laptop. There were many different benchmarks found where Fedora Workstation 44 was slower than the other Linux distributions tested. Each with the out-of-the-box configuration aside from setting the performance profile given the behavior seen out of other Panther Lake laptops and Intel's prior recommendation. With the performance disappointments on Fedora 44, now that time has allowed I dug deeper into these performance anomalies unique to Fedora. Fedora's disappointing performance was a surprise since it was on the Linux 7.1 kernel and other up-to-date software packages not too far off from the other Linux distributions tested on this Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Intel Core Ultra X9 388H SoC. Though one difference compared to the likes of Ubuntu was Fedora Workstation 44 shipping with Intel Thermald 2.5.9 rather than Thermald 2.5.11 on Ubuntu 26.04 LRS or the latest Thermald 2.5.12 upstream. Thermald 2.5.9 upstream was from February 2025. As I pointed out back in 2021, Intel Thermald can be very important for Linux on modern Intel laptops. Typically Fedora Linux ships with the latest software packages, but in the case of Thermald, it ended up being a non-responsive maintainer after the packager left Red Hat and thus it hasn't been updated in some time. Further increasing my hope it was just due to the outdated Thermald, Red Hat contributor Neal Gompa commented on that non-responsive maintainer ticket last week: "So, there are serious functionality problems with existing thermald in Fedora stable releases with laptops released in the past year or so, and one was flagged to me privately, which is what drove this. I'd like to be able to take over the packages I listed above as soon as possible so I can resolve these issues now and going forward as part of Fedora Ready work." And then also initiated last week was an update policy exception request for Thermald: "I would like to request a one-time exception for thermald across all Fedora branches.This is required to fix power management control on Intel-based machines that rely on thermald for this functionality, as many newer laptops released in the last couple of years have poorly working or completely non-functional support at the moment. ... Unfortunately no [for further information], these were privately disclosed under NDA by a Fedora Ready vendor." Given this came up shortly after my Framework Laptop 13 Pro benchmarks and finding the Fedora Workstation 44 outlier, it seemed like it would align with my findings. So from a new Fedora 44 install and with Thermald 2.5.12 now being pushed down as a Fedora 44 update, I ran some benchmarks in the affected workloads. Surprisingly, even with all of the Fedora 44 updates as of yesterday including Thermald 2.5.12, the performance was still behind the other Linux distributions on this Intel Panther Lake laptop. So it wasn't Thermald alone. Then I remembered that back in 2024, Fedora switched from Power-Profiles-Daemon to Tuned. Most other Linux distributions ship with power-profiles-daemon rather than the Red Hat Tuned project. Power-profiles-daemon isn't installed by default on Fedora 44 but is still available. So I tried sudo dnf swap tuned-ppd power-profiles-daemon and re-ran the affected benchmarks in the same performance mode as originally with Tuned. This time, Fedora 44 was now much more competitive and inline with the other Linux distributions. So while the newer Thermald may help Fedora 44 on newer Intel laptops, switching from tuned-ppd to power-profiles-daemon ended up being more impactful in allowing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro better compete with the other Linux distributions. Here are the power and performance numbers of those additional Fedora 44 runs on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H. The "Fedora 44 Repeat" run is the clean Fedora 44 install with all available updated as of 10 August and then "F44 power-profiles-daemon" is that same fresh environment when replacing tuned-ppd with power-profiles-daemon.