Hi,

My new XPS 13 (Haswell) arrived today and the first thing I noticed was the same sound you are mentioning. I hoped it would be solved already, since you can read about more or less the same issue on forums since mid 2012. It almost disappears when disabling the keyboard backlight.

Got a new XPS 13 (Haswell) as well and I also hear a high-pitched noise.  It almost sounds like the speaker is giving off feedback. Muting the speaker will cause the sound to disappear for a second, but it comes back.  If I play music  through the speakers it goes away as well, but comes back after a second or two after the music stops.

I'm curious if the sound you're hearing is the same as mine. How did you disable the keyboard backlight?

hey,

could you try blacklisting snd_hda_intel? I have read that powersaving of the HD audio may cause this issue and it significantly improved my situation here

Yeah, I'll give it a shot.  I'm plugged in now and don't hear it, so I unplugged - still didn't hear it - so I toggled mute/unmute and the sound appeared again. I plugged back in power cable -- still heard the whine -- so I toggled mute/unmute and the sound went away.

I also can confirm, as in your first post, that plugging in something to a USB port also stops the noise.

Next up, I'll blacklist the module and report back.  

Would you mind reporting the problem on Launchpad since this seems to probably be a kernel bug?

First I''m going to try booting from Linus' branch and see if it's already been fixed.  If not, I'll report it upstream.  I'll post with a url so everyone can play along at home if it comes to that.

Not loading the module did seem to get rid of the whine.  After I didn't hear it, I reloaded the module (with modprobe) and still didn't hear the whine, but then I still didn't have any sound, so apparently there's more to getting the sound to work than loading that module. Since then, I've rebooted with and without the module and the sound is there immediately with the module and not there without it.

I have noticed that if I disable the hda power savings the problem goes away. To do this permanently in 12.04, edit /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/intel-audio-powersave and set INTEL_AUDIO_POWERSAVE to false. Afterwards, you shouldn't see the value of /sys/module/intel_hda_snd/parameters/power_save change to 1 when you unplug.

I tried 3.13 but no change in behavior..

I just picked up a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Haswell, 9333) the other day and was dismayed to hear coil whine as soon as I turned it on :( I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and kernel 3.13, but the noise persists.

It's worst when the backlight is illuminated, as others have noted, and almost inaudible when deactivated. But it seems to correspond to what's on the screen; even moving a window around changes the pitch of the whine. Blacklisting snd_hda_intel had no effect.

On the XPS 13, the sound comes from the upper right, opposite the power connection. It doesn't seem to matter whether the power is connected or not.

I quite like the XPS, and I hope this isn't a hardware issue. I was hoping to use the laptop for a number of years, but I'm not sure I want to listen to this much longer. It mars an otherwise very impressive machine. I'll put through a support request and see what Dell has to say. Hopefully they can get to the bottom of it!

Sounds like there's more than one cause of a excessive noise.. :(

For the sound problem created by the snd_hda_intel driver (or hardware associated with it) I've opened https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69411

For what its worth, I have the xps13, but the one with Windbloz 8, and it makes the same noise in windoz.  seems unlikely to be a kernel bug, and more likely to be a HW problem with the components?  [edit- i have ubuntu 13.10 dual booted, and i get all the same things others are saying regardless of OS ]

Disabling the backlight seems to have done the trick for me - Fn-F6  Seems so quiet afterwards.

I should add I'm using the new XPS 13 Ultrabook developer edition (SSD) with Windows 8 later installed.

It's definitely the backlight causing issues for me. When the backlight comes on there's a high pitched squeal coming from the right side and the pitch changes depending on what I'm doing, for example scrolling a webpage.

Disabling the backlight has stopped the hideous sound but it's not the best solution. Does anyone know exactly what the noise is (now that we know it's related to the backlight) and will Dell ever fix it? Some Googling showed me it's been doing on with previous versions of the XPS 13 too.

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and have the high pitch whine as well.  I disabled the Intel HDA power save and it goes away.  Also, turning off the keyboard backlight works as well.

Edit: This is on the XPS 13 Sputnik 3