The Intel Sandybridge i7-2620M processor is capable of overheating Linux
I’ve been plagued for the last few months with problems with my Intel Graphics on my Lenovo T420. I originally bought this laptop specifically because of traditionally great Linux support for Thinkpad hardware. I had the option of Intel vs Nvidia graphics, and I chose Intel because Gnome3 was reputed to work better with the Intel graphics.
This laptop has pretty impressive
specs
An excerpt from
/proc/cpuinfo
on Linux
I’ve also got plenty of ram (excerpt from
/proc/meminfo:
My problems were:
- Overheating
- Poor performance when overheating
- Overheating
Frequently the temperature as reported by system monitor would register around 95C degrees, which is uncomfortably warm to both the lap and hands. I did a lot of probing around and eventually wrote a script to just detect when the graphics card was in a wierd state
After a lot of mailing list and Google research (months, not days or hours) I finally stumbled on this tidbit on the ArchWiki
Link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics#Choose_acceleration_method File to create: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
