laptop Intel HD Graphics heatsink fan: SOLVED

[Jake]

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