Kepler Clock Gating Queued In Nouveau DRM, Lowering Power Use

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 4 February 2018 at 11:53 AM EST. 11 Comments
NOUVEAU
Red Hat's Lyude Paul has been spending the past number of weeks working out clock-gating support for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with the open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver.

Clock-gating can drop the GPU power consumption by several Watts but isn't being enabled by default until more testing has been done. The support can be enabled via the nouveau.config=NvPmEnableGating= kernel module parameter. There's also Fermi support in progress but Kepler1/Kepler2 (GTX 600/700 series) is where the support is currently best positioned.

After going through several patch rounds, this work is now queued in Nouveau's DRM kernel tree. Ben Skeggs, also of Red Hat, pulled in the BLCG/SLCG clock-gating code to the DRM staging area. This work is too late for Linux 4.16 to be vetted and land during the merge window, so it's pushed off until Linux 4.17.

With this week's big DRM update for Linux 4.16 it sadly went without any Nouveau changes, but at least for Linux 4.17 there will hopefully be more Nouveau DRM driver improvements to note.
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