I have experienced overheating with the default installation of Ubuntu 16.04 on my MSI Destroyer notebook with dual graphic card (see relevant part of output of sudo lspci -v at bottom). After some searching I've concluded that somehow everything to display goes through my dedicated graphic card instead of the integrated one.
According to some instructions I ended up using this line in /etc/default/grub (I've run the update-grub afterwards):
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.modeset=1 radeon.dpm=1 radeon.runpm=0"
The overheating problem was more or less solved by this but I tried to turn the dedicated card off completely according to this instruction.
I've run this series of commands:
sudo su
echo IGD > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
(sudo su is there because running commands with sudo gave me error bash: /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch: Permission denied)
The first thing I noticed was how long it took to turn off the dedicated card so I've run dmesg just in case and these two strange errors showed up:
[drm:atom_op_jump [radeon]] *ERROR* atombios stuck in loop for more than 5secs aborting
[drm:atom_execute_table_locked [radeon]] *ERROR* atombios stuck executing CD12 (len 62, WS 0, PS 0) @ 0xCD2E
repeating each 5 seconds. After the command to switch the card off completed two things happened. Firstly the notebook was much colder (obviously the turning off the card was much more efficient than the grub configuration) and secondly after few seconds Ubuntu just froze for no obvious reasons.
What could possibly go wrong? Is this a bug in the graphic card driver? Shall I report it somewhere?
Just in case I add output of sudo lspci -v relevant to graphic cards:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Neptune XT [Radeon HD 8970M] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Radeon R9 M290X
Physical Slot: 0
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 37
Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at fea00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
Expansion ROM at fea40000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [48] Vendor Specific Information: Len=08 <?>
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=010 <?>
Capabilities: [150] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [270] #19
Capabilities: [2b0] Address Translation Service (ATS)
Capabilities: [2c0] #13
Capabilities: [2d0] #1b
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Richland [Radeon HD 8650G] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Richland [Radeon HD 8650G]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 36
Memory at c0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
I/O ports at f000 [size=256]
Memory at feb00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [58] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=010 <?>
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon
