[Intel-gfx] Fan running with Intel Graphics

[Johannes Bauer]

Hi list,

I hope that this is the right place to come. I have a Dell Latitude
E5520 Laptop (Sandy Bridge, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz)
and I'm using the Intel graphics driver that ships with Ubuntu (3.0.0
kernel):

joelaptop [~]: lspci -nn | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 2nd
Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
[8086:0126] (rev 09)

joelaptop [~]: dpkg -l | grep xorg | grep int
ii  xserver-xorg-video-intel               2:2.15.901-1ubuntu2.1
           X.Org X server -- Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver

I have one problem with this setup, however: The fan is running all the
time. It annoys the shit out of me. The reason why I suspect that
something might be off with the graphics card driver is that in
framebuffer mode, the fan is off. Only when I type in the password to my
cryptofs (which leaves the framebuffer and starts Xorg) the fan starts
running almost instantaniously.

And it's not even doing *anything*, the CPUs are all at almost 0%
(therefore I don't think there's much heat coming from there). I'm not
doing heavy graphics (not even light graphics, not even moving the mouse!).

How can I measure the graphics card load? Would it improve anything if I
compiled a kernel myself and switched to 3.1? Is there anything at all I
can do?

Best regards,
Joe