hello list,
i was trying to get qubes to work on a new laptop with an intel hd graphics gpu and observed the following behavior i had never encountered previously:
- install succeeded, but once i started running several appvms and restoring from a backup the heatsink fan was blowing a lot of hot air. neither dom0 nor the appvms were using any cpu (all at 0% or close), so i inferred that the heat was coming from the gpu.
after attempting several fixes, e.g. updating dom0 to use the 5.6 kernel and setting several kernel options, i did the following:
- in dom0 do 'journalctl | grep drm | less' and see a log '[drm] Reducing the compressed framebuffer size. This may lead to less power saving than a non-reduced size. Try to increase stolen memory size if available in BIOS.'
i rebooted the machine, went into the bios, and adjusted the memory for the integrated gpu upwards from its default setting. now the machine is working as expected - no unusual heatsink activity.
just in case adjusting the memory used by the gpu in the laptop bios doesn't work by itself (i haven't tested this), the following may be useful:
- in dom0 'sudo qubes-dom0-update kernel-latest' to install the latest stable 5.x kernel. you can also use --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-unstable
- [assumes uefi boot] in dom0 edit /boot/efi/EFI/qubes/xen.cfg kernel options to add i915.enable_fbc=0 and i915.enable_psr=0 to disable framebuffer compression and panel self refresh
i hope this can help someone else and save them some time that i lost.
regards
jake