nouveau/ PowerManagement

The following page contains information about the current state of PM, examples of how to use it and possible ways to determine if it may be used on your system.

It is currently only possible to read temperature and performance levels on several cards, as long as you have a recent enough kernel (nouveau git from October 2010 or 2.6.37), and a supported card.

Please note that this page is only a rough approximation of the current state of PM.

Key

  • "DONE" means... that it is thought to be fully implemented. May contain bugs.
  • "MOSTLY" means that it is mostly implemented and may have known bugs.
  • "WIP" means that someone has started on the initial implementation.
  • "TODO" means that someone needs to write the code. The required knowledge to write the code may or may not be known. Please ask on #nouveau if you want to get your feet wet on this.
  • "STALLED" means... that whatever code has been written is accumulating color and texture similar to that 3 week old slice of pizza in your fridge.

Status Matrix

Chipset NV04/05 NV10 NV20 NV30 NV40 NV50 NVC0 NVE0 NV110 NV130 NV140 NV160
VBIOS tables parsing
Performance levels N/A MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY TODO TODO TODO
Voltage N/A N/A N/A MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY TODO TODO TODO
Thermal settings N/A N/A N/A MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY TODO TODO TODO
Memory timings N/A ? ? STALLED STALLED MOSTLY DONE DONE MOSTLY TODO TODO TODO
Mem clock/timing mapping N/A N/A N/A N/A DONE DONE DONE DONE MOSTLY TODO TODO TODO
Power Management
Engine reclocking N/A N/A N/A MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY WIP TODO TODO TODO TODO
Memory reclocking N/A MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY MOSTLY WIP WIP TODO TODO TODO TODO
Voltage adjusting N/A N/A N/A internal only internal only internal only internal only internal only internal only TODO TODO TODO
Thermal sensors N/A N/A DONE1 DONE1 DONE1 DONE1 DONE1 DONE DONE TODO TODO TODO
Fanspeed control N/A N/A N/A DONE DONE2 DONE2 DONE2 DONE DONE TODO TODO TODO

Notes

  • 1: I²C temperature probes cannot always be read from Nouveau's hwmon interface.
  • 2: I²C fans cannot be managed with Nouveau's hwmon interface.

Docs

Some documentation related to power management on NVIDIA GPUs have been published as part of a research paper named Reverse Engineering Power Management on NVIDIA GPUs - a Detailed Overview.