Arch Linux

gekopoiss

Member

Registered: 2020-11-27

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Fan control on nouveau

I'd greatly appreciate any advice on getting manual GPU fan control to work on nouveau drivers. This is one of the few things remaining that's still bugging be about my configuration.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

I've tried writing values to pwm1_enable and pwm, as per the Arch wiki and other manuals. This, however, results in:

[root@archlinux geko]# echo 1 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm1_enable
bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument

I'm not entirely sure what this means, here's the output of ls -la:

[root@archlinux hwmon3]# ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    0 Nov 27 18:24 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    0 Nov 27 18:24 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Nov 27 18:25 device -> ../../../0000:01:00.0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 fan1_input
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 name
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0 Nov 27 18:26 power
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 pwm1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:47 pwm1_enable
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:45 pwm1_max
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 pwm1_min
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Nov 27 18:25 subsystem -> ../../../../../../class/hwmon
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 temp1_auto_point1_pwm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 temp1_auto_point1_temp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 temp1_auto_point1_temp_hyst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_crit
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_crit_hyst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_emergency
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_emergency_hyst
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_input
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_max
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:25 temp1_max_hyst
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:24 uevent
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Nov 27 18:44 update_interval

Another interesting thing that I've noticed is that the fan RPM seems to be statically set at boot time. As in, powering on the computer might not turn on the fans at all, but rebooting (or powering off and on) after the GPU has heated up a bit results in higher fan RPMs.

It might be worth noting that I've already tried a bunch of things at might have some sorts of residual configurations. I at one point had Nvidia proprietary drivers installed, and have also messed around with fancontrol and pwmconfig.

I don't think this should be that difficult, and I'm not entirely sure why I can't just write to the files. Any guidance or hints would be appreciated.

Last edited by gekopoiss (2020-11-28 10:40:20)

chaseleif

Member

From: Texas

Registered: 2020-08-01

Posts: 18

Re: [SOLVED] Fan control on nouveau

From the top of Arch's Nvidia install directions, installing Nvidia drivers should also add a blacklist for the nouveau driver.

I've turned the blacklist off before for some reason that I don't remember, but I do remember (besides the display being different) that my fan ran at full speed.

You should likely see these lines when you do:

grep -R "blacklist nouveau" /usr/lib/modprobe.d /usr/lib64/modprobe.d

If the lines start with a # they are commented out, if you see "blacklist nouveau" without the # then the nouveau driver is blacklisted.

From: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Then: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html
I see this entry: NV134 (GP104)     GeForce GTX (1070, 1080)

If I am not mistaken, it looks like you should be using the latest Nvidia driver (not nouveau).
(i.e. "pacman -S nvidia")

Last edited by chaseleif (2020-11-28 02:10:20)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,361

Re: [SOLVED] Fan control on nouveau

I'm fairly certain that lack of fan control is one of the big reasons for nouveaus lackluster  performance and can not simply be done, do you know any sources that show that this should be possible? https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/ mentions a few older models that have this, but doesn't sound like it's present for Pascal

Last edited by V1del (2020-11-28 03:10:39)

gekopoiss

Member

Registered: 2020-11-27

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Fan control on nouveau

You should likely see these lines when you do:

grep -R "blacklist nouveau" /usr/lib/modprobe.d /usr/lib64/modprobe.d

This results in no output.

Either way, I thank both of you for your help. I will probably move to Nvidia drivers then. I'd prefer to be using them anyway, the reason why I'm not at the moment is that I want to be able to set monitor refresh rate to 240 Hz at boot time, but was only able to find a way how to do it with Nouveau drivers.