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Dell Precision 5470

This is a device reference

What a machine or peripheral is, and how it presents itself to Linux. Anything learned whilst getting it to work lives elsewhere and links back here.

The Precision 5470 is Dell's 14-inch mobile workstation on Intel's Alder Lake-P platform.
Vendor Dell
Form factor Notebook, 14-inch, DMI chassis type 10
Processor Intel Core i7-12800H, Alder Lake-P, 14-core hybrid
Memory 32 GB, of which 30 GiB is visible to the kernel
Graphics Intel Iris Xe, Alder Lake-P GT2, at 00:02.0, alongside a discrete NVIDIA GPU at 01:00.0 currently switched off
Display eDP-1, 2560x1600, 301 x 188 mm
Audio Alder Lake PCH-P High Definition Audio controller at 00:1f.3, driving a SoundWire codec through SOF
Wireless Intel AX211 CNVi, iwlwifi for Wi-Fi and btusb for Bluetooth
Firmware BIOS 1.31.1, board 08DX30
Read through Manjaro Linux, kernel 6.18.49

Everything above was read off the running machine rather than from a specification sheet, per the convention for this genre.

The processor enumerates without SMT

The kernel presents 14 logical CPUs, one thread per core, and /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control reads notsupported. That matches the physical core count of the part, six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, but not the thread count its performance cores would normally contribute. Anything that sizes a thread pool from nproc on this machine gets 14, and anything expecting hyperthreading to be togglable at runtime finds the control unavailable rather than merely off.

Audio runs over SoundWire

The audio controller is enumerated as ordinary Intel HD Audio, but the codec behind it is reached over SoundWire and driven by the Sound Open Firmware stack, so ALSA presents a single card named sof-soundwire rather than the HDA Intel PCH a classic setup would show. The consequence that surfaces most often is the node names, which carry platform-sof_sdw and a HiFi__ prefix:

alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-sof_sdw.HiFi__Speaker__sink
alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-sof_sdw.HiFi__Headphones__sink

A configuration snippet written against a HDA Intel PCH node name will not match anything here, which is worth knowing before concluding that a rule has been ignored.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are one part

The AX211 is a CNVi design, so the Wi-Fi side attaches through the chipset whilst the Bluetooth side appears on the USB bus as 8087:0033 and is driven by btusb. rfkill therefore lists four entries rather than two: the two Dell platform switches, dell-wifi and dell-bluetooth, and the two radios themselves, phy0 and hci0. A radio can be blocked at either level, and the platform switch is the one a function key toggles.

The discrete GPU is switched off

This unit has the discrete NVIDIA GPU, on the x16 bridge at 00:01.0. It does not appear in lspci, and that absence is the thing to be careful about: the device is removed at boot rather than missing.

EnvyControl1 holds the machine in integrated mode, which it does with two files. A modprobe blacklist refuses nouveau and every nvidia module, and a udev rule removes the hardware as it is enumerated:

# /etc/udev/rules.d/50-remove-nvidia.rules
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de", ATTR{class}=="0x03[0-9]*", \
  ATTR{power/control}="auto", ATTR{remove}="1"

So the rule fires on any NVIDIA display controller, sets it to autosuspend and unbinds it. By the time anything asks lspci what is on the bus, bridge 00:01.0 has an empty secondary bus behind it. Two things still record that the GPU exists: EnvyControl's own cache names its address, and the bridge is there with nowhere to lead.

$ envycontrol --query
integrated
$ cat /var/cache/envycontrol/cache.json
{ "nvidia_gpu_pci_bus": "PCI:1:0:0" }

The NVIDIA driver packages are installed and current for the same reason, rather than being leftovers: envycontrol -s hybrid and a reboot bring the card back, and it needs its drivers to be there when it returns. The visible consequence in the meantime is that nvidia-suspend, nvidia-resume and nvidia-hibernate are enabled units that skip themselves on every sleep:

systemd[1]: nvidia-hibernate.service: Skipped due to 'exec-condition'.

That line sits close enough to the sleep transition to look relevant when reading a journal for something else, and on this machine it is noise.

The following pages link to this page:

  1. EnvyControl: a tool to switch between hybrid and dedicated graphics, last modified 2026-09-28 ↩