Will Nouveau Driver Impact Ubuntu 12.04's Battery?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Will Nouveau Driver Impact Ubuntu 12.04's Battery?

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is shipping with the Nouveau driver by default as the open-source (reverse-engineered) NVIDIA graphics driver support, just as they have done in previous releases, but will this cause your mobile device to go through increased power use?..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA4MDU

[not.sure]

Rather than using a nice utility like nvidia-settings, the re-clocking must be done via writing to Nouveau sysfs entries.

Wow. If we are at a stage where we can whine about that power management must be in a good shape.

[WorBlux]

Wow. If we are at a stage where we can whine about that power management must be in a good shape.

I think doing via sysfs is better in the long run though, as it's compatible with third party power management software like the Jupiter applet.

[birdie]

Finally Michael has proven that nouveau is slower than the binary driver because it runs the GPU at the lowest possible speed.

[orome]

Finally Michael has proven that nouveau is slower than the binary driver because it runs the GPU at the lowest possible speed.

it was not the lowest possible speed, it was the 2nd level out of 3.

Michael could add Nouveau powersave(level 0) and Nouveau performance(level 3) to his graphs to make this more interesting.

On the other hand I wonder why the blob could not reach the lowest state in the idle test (I assume it didn't as the power consumption would be lower IMO), could it be Unity keeping the card busy?

[evolution]

Well, I'm very happy for the results of nouveau, it's great to see I might be able to use my card without consuming much more power than if I use nVidia + Bumblebee. I'd also like to see some tests comparing FOSS ATI vs fglrx. I bet the results here are (unfortunately) very different...

Cheers

[brent]

I'd like to give it a try, but nouveau still completely fails on my GPU (Geforce GT240 DDR5). Black screen and crash. Nouveau developers weren't able to help beyond saying "it should work". Sigh.

This is a known issue, and has been known for a year or so.

[Michael]

I think doing via sysfs is better in the long run though, as it's compatible with third party power management software like the Jupiter applet.

NVIDIA's implementation is already compatible with third-party apps via the NV_CONTROL extension or using the command-line nvidia-settings command to query/set states.