Core 2 Duo CPU whine - workaround for Linux

Do you use Linux on a laptop and fear you're going to be driven totally insane by the high-pitched whining noise (squeal/screech) coming from your Core 2 Duo CPU's badly designed cpu packaging and voltage regulation? Like proximity to your laptop gives you tinea?

Me too. A workaround that'll cost you a little battery life (but probably not more than a few tens of minutes out of four-plus hour runtimes) is to add processor.max_cstate=3 to your grub command line. This turns off the problematic C4 power state of deep CPU sleep at reduced voltage, but otherwise leaves power management unaffected.

( For Ubuntu users, dpkg-reconfigure grub2 will offer to let you edit the kernel command line. )