Wednesday, May 26, 2010

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. )

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for this. On my macbook2,1, I had to supply processor.max_cstate=2 on the command line to eliminate the bloody, dreaded idle squeal. Apparently even C3 is problematic for this guy. But oh, is it ever nice to have this sorted out for good.

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