Dell XPS 15 runs hot on linux

This is what I do on my box. It is not a Dell XPS and I do not run openSUSE, so your mileage may vary. There are some steps that might be slightly different for openSUSE but you seem to know your way around. If you need any help just comment.

acpi_call is brought to us by Hybrid Graphics Linux. Visit here or follow this post for instructions to disable/ activate your discrete card . For me, I disabled the discrete card and only make use of the integrated card. This was the main culprit for the heat emissions.

Check your output of lspci -mvknn | grep -B8 i915. If it returns non-empty, you may add i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 to your boot parameters.

pcie_aspm=force can also be added if all PCIe hardware on the system supports Active State Power Management.

Please, use this options with care. This post explains what does each of these parameters do and their consequences.

Just yesterday I messed with an Dell XPS 15 w/ Ubuntu 11.10 that was also running very hot most of the time. I was able to make it chill out by installing laptop-mode-tools and cpufreqd using apt-get.

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools cpufreqd cpufrequtils

I am still using opensuse 11.4, but I solved this problem (as well as the battery life) by using "bumblebee", a bit hard to configure but it really gets to manage notebooks (like my dell XPS 1502) with optimus technology.