Intel's PCIe Cooling Driver Ready For Linux 6.13 To Reduce Bandwidth When Running Hot

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

Intel's PCIe cooling driver was queued this past week into the PCI subsystem's "next" branch. With the PCIe cooling driver now present there, it should be submitted in November as part of the PCI updates for the Linux 6.13 merge window.

The PCIe cooling driver can be enabled via the new "PCIE_THERMAL" Kconfig switch and simply described as:

"This implements PCIe cooling mechanism through bandwidth reduction for PCIe devices."

Hopefully you don't need it but if you are facing thermal issues due to the ever increasing speeds of PCI Express devices, this cooling driver will be part of the Linux kernel.