I'm sorry I cannot solve your problem entirely, but here are a few clues and ways to mitigate the problem.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Chris Fisher from Jupiter Broadcasting (VP of Community at LinuxAcademy) has/had the exact same issue with his X1 Extreme or something like that. He talked about it a lot in "Linux Unplugged" (that was maybe 8-10 months ago iirc). I seem to remember it was related to Thunderbolt over USB-C for him, because of the dock or external monitor. You could ask people at JB (they have an IRC etc), I'm sure someone remembers if there's a fix Chris found.
I know there is a Thunderbolt "Assist Mode" in BIOS settings that apparently bricks some laptops when enabled, so be extremely careful when fiddling with settings. Research first, backup always.
Secondly, I'm not sure about your use case but running an LTS kernel on a laptop is usually not a good idea. You might think it's more stable but in fact, because things tend to change fast these days, it's more a hit-or-miss where multiple hardware issues can creep up. I've been cured, I only run recent kernels on my X1 Yoga 3rd (19.04 works well enough for me, have you tried it?)
If you really need the LTS/kernel version, consider maybe a headless VM or container and SSH into that. With KVM+virtio drivers you shouldn't even feel the difference.
A few pointers to research the issue, maybe:
use
turbostat
turbostat if you want real hardware readings, everything else (read from /proc etc.) is "what the systems intends to set" (e.g. CPU core frequency), not what is actually happening. TurbostatTurbostat (more) is low-level enough for that.if you really must keep firing these two commands, maybe use a
cron
job?@reboot
with somesleep n ; command
to make sure it's up. Alternatively, asystemd
timer
unit if you prefer. (food for thought.) This should at least automate the fix.
I hope you solve it, but it might be related to your particular combination of kernel version/mods and hardware. I'd personally try other distros/kernels before going too deep down the rabbit hole. Unless you like compiling custom kernels, of course.
Do report how it goes!