Ever since I last upgraded my Ubuntu system, believe it was to 16.10, I've had severe overheating issues. Now I've upgraded again to 18.04.1 and I still have the same issues. I thought it was simply because my laptop was getting old and it was hardware related. I then tried running Fedora 28 and realized that I had no issues at all when it came to temperature. After some digging I'm thinking it might be because of Ubuntu moving to using a more modern Intel modesetting driver that renders 2D on the GPU as well as 3D. I have an older laptop using Intel HD Graphics 3000 which I believe is overheating because of this.
I'm not all too familiar with how this is configured and what options I have. All I seem to be able to find is info on how to tweak the active Intel driver for performance but none on how to enable the legacy driver.
Any ideas on how I can enable the legacy driver to see if this is what's causing the problem?
Update 1
More background: According to what I've found when researching, Ubuntu switched DDX driver to using x86-modesetting instead of x86-intel-video which I believe is considered deprecated now, but since Intel support is deprecated for Sandy Bridge (HD Graphics 3000) it's not being supported officially in the new driver.
LSHW output:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 09
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: irq:31 memory:f0000000-f03fffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:3000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff
Update 2
There's more information about the switch from the legacy DDX driver to the modesetting driver in Linux land at this Arch wiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_graphics#Installation
I added this intel config file for xorg and I think it might have fixed things since it's no longer overheating as easily. Can anyone confirm if this configuration is what forced the legacy driver to be used, and if so, I can write an explanation that can be marked as accepted answer to help other users with similar issues?
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
Option "TearFree" "true"
Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection
