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#1 2016-07-16 12:46:08

TheFiddler
Member
Registered: 2009-02-09
Posts: 38

Nvidia GPU power saving

What is the correct way to enable power saving on a Nvidia gpu, using the nvidia drivers?

My setup is as follows:
- Intel HD4000-series IGP (IvyBridge, two monitors attached)
- Nvidia GTX 1080 (no monitor attached)
- Wayland (Gnome 3.20)

I am using the GPU for CUDA processing only, without any graphical output. This appears to be working correctly, however the GPU does not enter a powersaving state when not in use. I installed the drivers using the nvidia package.

I have a similar setup on Ubuntu 16.04 with a Haswell IGP and two GTX 1080s. That setup is running Xorg (with well known login problems, due to the lack of libglvnd), so you can only login through ssh. Despite that, the Nvidia GPUs appear to be powering down correctly when not in use.

Questions:
1. Is there a way to manual set the powerstate of a Nvidia GPU, when using the nvidia drivers?
2. Do you have any ideas why the GPU might not be powering down, even though no process is accessing it and no monitor is attached?

It's a long-shot but, hey, the Arch community is amazingly good so who knows? smile

Edit: nvidia-smi output

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 367.35                 Driver Version: 367.35                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 1080    Off  | 0000:01:00.0     Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   51C    P0    46W / 240W |      0MiB /  8111MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Edit 2: note that I am running Wayland, so nvidia-settings does not work.

Last edited by TheFiddler (2016-07-16 12:47:47)


The Open Toolkit: OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL and Vulkan for Mono/.Net.

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#2 2016-07-19 23:13:42

TheFiddler
Member
Registered: 2009-02-09
Posts: 38

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

Small update: if I use VGA passthrough to assign this GPU to a Windows VM, then power management works correctly and nvidia-smi shows just 8-9W consumption.

Lack of idle power states only appears to be a problem when using the GPU on the Arch host. Xorg vs Wayland does not appear to make any difference.

Still holding on to the hope that this is just some configuration setting that must be enabled.


The Open Toolkit: OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL and Vulkan for Mono/.Net.

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#3 2017-03-18 05:42:08

cyyyyc123
Member
Registered: 2017-03-03
Posts: 6

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

I also encountered this problem. Does anyone know how to solve it?

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#4 2017-03-18 12:30:56

cyyyyc123
Member
Registered: 2017-03-03
Posts: 6

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

I find a workaround: turn on persistence mode by typing
sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1

then everything works fine again.

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#5 2017-03-23 21:02:58

ZSmith
Member
Registered: 2017-02-25
Posts: 16

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

Might want to look at the article for Nvidia Optimus laptops as they have a similar setup. The wiki has an article on the various options to configure these.

Last edited by ZSmith (2017-03-23 21:06:01)

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#6 2021-07-17 14:33:13

AkhilJalagam
Member
Registered: 2017-08-13
Posts: 14

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

cyyyyc123 wrote:

I find a workaround: turn on persistence mode by typing
sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1

then everything works fine again.

this worked for me. thank you. but This solution is near end-of-life and will be eventually deprecated in favor the Persistence Daemon.  ->  https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/driver-p … nce/#usage

To run the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon, simply run (as root): 

# nvidia-persistenced --user foo

Last edited by AkhilJalagam (2021-07-17 14:33:59)

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#7 2021-08-11 00:03:40

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,431

Re: Nvidia GPU power saving

Please don't dig up a 4 year old threads, closing this old thread.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … bumping%22

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