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. A discussion surrounding power management controls has also opened up to the larger Linux GPU driver development community at large.

This discussion has been taking place in this mailing list thread (and then carried on over to dri-devel) for the past few days. Brought up are how to expose power management options to the user (e.g. by sysfs or procfs), what sort of power management scaling algorithm to utilize, and basically how to handle this entire process.

Power management support for NVIDIA graphics cards in the Nouveau driver is not expected until the Linux 2.6.34 kernel or later, but it's certainly a matter of interest to many. The open-source ATI developers have also been working on their in-kernel DRM power management support too.