I’ve been running AMD ThinkPads for a while and always felt like the stock kernel carries a lot of dead weight, like Intel CPU/GPU drivers, NVIDIA, Dell/HP/Asus vendor blobs, server SCSI controllers, legacy filesystems, ancient WiFi drivers from 2003. None of that belongs on a ThinkPad.
So I built detkernel (yeah, I know), a custom kernel that strips all of that out and keeps only what AMD ThinkPads actually need.
What’s removed:
- Intel CPU/GPU (i915, xe, microcode)
- NVIDIA (nouveau)
- All non-ThinkPad vendor drivers (Dell, HP, Asus, Sony, Apple…)
- Server SCSI controllers (Adaptec, LSI, HP SmartArray…)
- Legacy WiFi (Prism, ZyDAS, old Ralink, IPW2100/2200…)
- Dead filesystems (ReiserFS, HFS, UFS, JFFS2…)
- Legacy network protocols (AppleTalk, ATM, X.25…)
What stays:
- Full AMD support (Zen1–Zen5, RDNA GPU, ACP audio, PMC, P-state)
- All ThinkPad WiFi chips (Intel AX, Qualcomm WCN, MediaTek MT7921/MT7925, Realtek RTW89)
- Realtek LAN (it’s in every ThinkPad)
- HDA Realtek audio + USB audio
- ThinkPad ACPI, HID Lenovo
- KVM/AMD, VFIO
Two variants:
detkernel-universal— x86-64-v3, works on all AMD ThinkPads (T495 and newer)detkernel-zen5— znver5, for Ryzen AI 300 series (T14 G5-G6, T16 G3, P14s G5-G6), includes 500Hz tick, BBRv3 TCP, NTSYNC for Wine/Proton
Distributed as UKI (.efi) for systemd-boot users — just drop it in /boot/EFI/Linux/ and reboot. vmlinuz + initramfs also available for GRUB/rEFInd.
Currently based on Linux 7.0.12-zen1.
GitHub: https://github.com/Detcom-GH/detkernel
Looking for testers, especially on older models (T495, T14 G1-G2, L14/L15). Would love to hear how it runs on your machine.
Gentoo users would just use the build script (which is there). The binary releases are for people who want the benefits without the 20-minute compile time (and I’ve spent much more than 20 minutes, because I’ve recompiled and tested the hell out of it for multiple times). Trust is a valid concern, the config files are in the repo so you can verify what’s in there.