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Discussing Nouveau Driver Power Management

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  • Discussing Nouveau Driver Power Management

    Phoronix: Discussing Nouveau Driver Power Management

    While the Nouveau driver is now beginning to be trimmed down a bit as non-KMS support is being dropped, this free software NVIDIA driver will be gaining some new code in the form of power management support. Power management for NVIDIA hardware in the Nouveau driver stack is still early on, but a patch is being prepared and a discussion has been initiated how to handle the power management controls for this driver...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Yay I cant await powermanagement coming to nouveau. The lack of it is the only thing stopping me from using it exclusively.

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    • #3
      I really hope that there will be a very good infrastructure that will be used for every free driver.

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      • #4
        I recently got a new laptop with an nvidia graphics card. I previously had an Intel. I'm looking forward to using nouveau so I can get things like xrandr back.

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        • #5
          To my surprise I found nouveau working pretty well with Fedora 12. Unfortunately power consumption of my system with a GTX 280 is 28W higher than with the proprietary driver, so I switched back until Power Management is ready.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by puntarenas View Post
            To my surprise I found nouveau working pretty well with Fedora 12. Unfortunately power consumption of my system with a GTX 280 is 28W higher than with the proprietary driver, so I switched back until Power Management is ready.
            That's odd though. nouveau ppl said that nouveau runs the GPU exclusively in the lowest power level possible, like vesa or nv drivers.
            Mhm, could be interrupts and wake-ups to the CPU or so...?!

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            • #7
              The GTX 280 definitely doesn't switch to the lowest power profile (and/or enable clock gating?!) without a driver present, so maybe Nouoveau people were talking about other Nvidia architectures.

              For example, if I enter the mainboard BIOS I can see the same idle consumption and it doesnt't drop until booting into Windows or Fedora with proprietary Nvidia drivers installed.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by not.sure View Post
                That's odd though. nouveau ppl said that nouveau runs the GPU exclusively in the lowest power level possible, like vesa or nv drivers.
                Mhm, could be interrupts and wake-ups to the CPU or so...?!
                That is simply wrong. With nouveau the gpu and vram stay at the bios' default clockspeed. In my case with my quadro nvs 140m that is power level 1, so it's far from optimal. And that is why my power consumption is 2-3W higher than with the nvidia driver (that's a lot on a laptop).

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by mistvieh View Post
                  That is simply wrong. With nouveau the gpu and vram stay at the bios' default clockspeed. In my case with my quadro nvs 140m that is power level 1, so it's far from optimal. And that is why my power consumption is 2-3W higher than with the nvidia driver (that's a lot on a laptop).

                  That makes sense. Radeon also lacks any sort of clock switching, so it uses the BIOS default clocks/voltage (Boot-up frequencies), which are considerably higher than the regular low power state.

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