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.