NVIDIA Working On VFIO Power Management Improvements For Linux

A NVIDIA engineer is working on addressing the currently "very limited" power management support available with the Linux kernel's upstream VFIO PCI driver.

NVIDIA's Abhishek Sahu has been working to improve Linux's VFIO-PCI driver to offer more robust power management support. This morning he sent out the latest version of his patches providing power management improvements to this driver.

With this patch series he works to add run-time power management support and providing optional D3cold support. PCI D3cold for devices under the VFIO PCI driver can provide for power savings when the hardware is not engaged but it's also this state where the device's presence cannot be detected until bumped up to a higher state, which can make things tricky on the software side and other obstacles -- in part why the VFIO power management support has been rather limited to date.

Anyhow, for those making use of VFIO for PCI(e) devices on Linux can learn more about this pending power management work via this patch series.