Power limit nvidia linux

NVIDIA/Tips and tricks

Contents

Fixing terminal resolution

Transitioning from nouveau may cause your startup terminal to display at a lower resolution.

For systemd-boot, set console-mode in esp/EFI/loader/loader.conf . See systemd-boot#Loader configuration for details.

For rEFInd, add to esp/EFI/refind/refind.conf and /etc/refind.d/refind.conf (latter file is optional but recommended):

A small caveat is that this will hide the kernel parameters from being shown during boot.

Using TV-out

X with a TV (DFP) as the only display

The X server falls back to CRT-0 if no monitor is automatically detected. This can be a problem when using a DVI connected TV as the main display, and X is started while the TV is turned off or otherwise disconnected.

To force NVIDIA to use DFP, store a copy of the EDID somewhere in the filesystem so that X can parse the file instead of reading EDID from the TV/DFP.

To acquire the EDID, start nvidia-settings. It will show some information in tree format, ignore the rest of the settings for now and select the GPU (the corresponding entry should be titled «GPU-0» or similar), click the DFP section (again, DFP-0 or similar), click on the Acquire Edid Button and store it somewhere, for example, /etc/X11/dfp0.edid .

If in the front-end mouse and keyboard are not attached, the EDID can be acquired using only the command line. Run an X server with enough verbosity to print out the EDID block:

After the X Server has finished initializing, close it and your log file will probably be in /var/log/Xorg.0.log . Extract the EDID block using nvidia-xconfig:

Edit xorg.conf by adding to the Device section:

The ConnectedMonitor option forces the driver to recognize the DFP as if it were connected. The CustomEDID provides EDID data for the device, meaning that it will start up just as if the TV/DFP was connected during X the process.

This way, one can automatically start a display manager at boot time and still have a working and properly configured X screen by the time the TV gets powered on.

If the above changes did not work, in the xorg.conf under Device section you can try to remove the Option «ConnectedMonitor» «DFP» and add the following lines:

The NoDFPNativeResolutionCheck prevents NVIDIA driver from disabling all the modes that do not fit in the native resolution.

Headless (no monitor) resolution

In headless mode, resolution falls back to 640×480, which is used by VNC or Steam Link. To start in a higher resolution e.g. 1920×1080, specify a Virtual entry under the Screen subsection in xorg.conf :

Check the power source

The NVIDIA X.org driver can also be used to detect the GPU’s current source of power. To see the current power source, check the ‘GPUPowerSource’ read-only parameter (0 — AC, 1 — battery):

Listening to ACPI events

NVIDIA drivers automatically try to connect to the acpid daemon and listen to ACPI events such as battery power, docking, some hotkeys, etc. If connection fails, X.org will output the following warning:

While completely harmless, you may get rid of this message by disabling the ConnectToAcpid option in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf :

If you are on laptop, it might be a good idea to install and enable the acpid daemon instead.

Displaying GPU temperature in the shell

There are three methods to query the GPU temperature. nvidia-settings requires that you are using X, nvidia-smi or nvclock do not. Also note that nvclock currently does not work with newer NVIDIA cards such as GeForce 200 series cards as well as embedded GPUs such as the Zotac IONITX’s 8800GS.

nvidia-settings

To display the GPU temp in the shell, use nvidia-settings as follows:

This will output something similar to the following:

The GPU temps of this board is 41 C.

In order to get just the temperature for use in utilities such as rrdtool or conky:

nvidia-smi

Use nvidia-smi which can read temps directly from the GPU without the need to use X at all, e.g. when running Wayland or on a headless server. To display the GPU temperature in the shell, use nvidia-smi as follows:

This should output something similar to the following:

Only for temperature:

In order to get just the temperature for use in utilities such as rrdtool or conky:

nvclock

Use nvclock AUR which is available from the AUR.

There can be significant differences between the temperatures reported by nvclock and nvidia-settings/nv-control. According to this post by the author (thunderbird) of nvclock, the nvclock values should be more accurate.

Overclocking and cooling

Enabling overclocking

Overclocking is controlled via Coolbits option in the Device section, which enables various unsupported features:

The Coolbits value is the sum of its component bits in the binary numeral system. The component bits are:

• 1 (bit 0) — Enables overclocking of older (pre-Fermi) cores on the Clock Frequencies page in nvidia-settings.
• 2 (bit 1) — When this bit is set, the driver will «attempt to initialize SLI when using GPUs with different amounts of video memory».
• 4 (bit 2) — Enables manual configuration of GPU fan speed on the Thermal Monitor page in nvidia-settings.
• 8 (bit 3) — Enables overclocking on the PowerMizer page in nvidia-settings. Available since version 337.12 for the Fermi architecture and newer.[1]
• 16 (bit 4) — Enables overvoltage using nvidia-settings CLI options. Available since version 346.16 for the Fermi architecture and newer.[2]

To enable multiple features, add the Coolbits values together. For example, to enable overclocking and overvoltage of Fermi cores, set Option «Coolbits» «24» .

The documentation of Coolbits can be found in /usr/share/doc/nvidia/html/xconfigoptions.html and here.

Setting static 2D/3D clocks

Set the following string in the Device section to enable PowerMizer at its maximum performance level (VSync will not work without this line):

Allow change to highest performance mode

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Since changing performance mode and overclocking memory rate has little to no effect in nvidia-settings, try this:

• Setting Coolbits to 24 or 28 and remove Powermizer RegistryDwords -> Restart X
• find out max. Clock and Memory rate. (this can be LOWER than what your gfx card reports after booting!):
• set rates for GPU 0:

After setting the rates the max. performance mode works in nvidia-settings and you can overclock graphics-clock and memory transfer rate.

Saving overclocking settings

Typically, clock and voltage offsets inserted in the nvidia-settings interface are not saved, being lost after a reboot. Fortunately, there are tools that offer an interface for overclocking under the proprietary driver, able to save the user’s overclocking preferences and automatically applying them on boot. Some of them are:

• gweAUR — graphical, applies settings on desktop session start
• nvclockAUR and systemd-nvclock-unitAUR — graphical, applies settings on system boot
• nvocAUR — text based, profiles are configuration files in /etc/nvoc.d/ , applies settings on desktop session start

Custom TDP Limit

Modern Nvidia graphics cards throttle frequency to stay in their TDP and temperature limits. To increase performance it is possible to change the TDP limit, which will result in higher temperatures and higher power consumption.

For example, to set the power limit to 160.30W:

To set the power limit on boot (without driver persistence):

Set fan speed at login

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You can adjust the fan speed on your graphics card with nvidia-settings’ console interface. First ensure that your Xorg configuration has enabled the bit 2 in the Coolbits option.

Place the following line in your xinitrc file to adjust the fan when you launch Xorg. Replace n with the fan speed percentage you want to set.

You can also configure a second GPU by incrementing the GPU and fan number.

If you use a login manager such as GDM or SDDM, you can create a desktop entry file to process this setting. Create

/.config/autostart/nvidia-fan-speed.desktop and place this text inside it. Again, change n to the speed percentage you want.

To make it possible to adjust the fanspeed of more than one graphics card, run:

Kernel module parameters

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Some options can be set as kernel module parameters, a full list can be obtained by running modinfo nvidia or looking at nv-reg.h . See Gentoo:NVidia/nvidia-drivers#Kernel module parameters as well.

For example, enabling the following will turn on kernel mode setting (see above) and enable the PAT feature [5], which affects how memory is allocated. PAT was first introduced in Pentium III [6] and is supported by most newer CPUs (see wikipedia:Page attribute table#Processors). If your system can support this feature, it should improve performance.

On some notebooks, to enable any nvidia settings tweaking you must include this option, otherwise it responds with «Setting applications clocks is not supported» etc.

Preserve video memory after suspend

By default the NVIDIA Linux drivers save and restore only essential video memory allocations on system suspend and resume. Quoting NVIDIA ([7], also available with the nvidia-utils package in /usr/share/doc/nvidia/html/powermanagement.html): The resulting loss of video memory contents is partially compensated for by the user-space NVIDIA drivers, and by some applications, but can lead to failures such as rendering corruption and application crashes upon exit from power management cycles.

The still experimental system enables saving all video memory (given enough space on disk or main RAM). The interface is through the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend file as follows: write «suspend» (or «hibernate») to /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend immediately before writing to the usual Linux /sys/power/state file, write «resume» to /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend immediately after waking up, or after an unsuccessful attempt to suspend or hibernate.

The NVIDIA drivers rely on a user defined file system for storage. The chosen file system needs to support unnamed temporary files (ext4 works) and have sufficient capacity for storing the video memory allocations (e.g., at least (sum of the memory capacities of all NVIDIA GPUs) * 1.2 ). Use the command nvidia-smi -q -d MEMORY to list the memory capacities of all GPUs in the system.

To choose the file system used for storing video memory during system sleep (and change the default video memory save/restore strategy to save and restore all video memory allocations), it is necessary to pass two options to the «nvidia» kernel module. For example, write the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-power-management.conf and reboot:

Feel free to replace «/tmp-nvidia» in the previous line with a path within your desired file system.

The interaction with /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend is handled by the simple Unix shell script at /usr/bin/nvidia-sleep.sh, which will itself be called by a tool like Systemd. The Archlinux nvidia-utils package ships with the following relevant Systemd services (which essentially just call nvidia-sleep.sh): nvidia-suspend , nvidia-hibernate , nvidia-resume . Contrary to NVIDIA’s instructions, it is currently not necessary to enable nvidia-resume (and it is in fact probably not a good idea to enable it), because the /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia script does the same thing as the service (but slightly earlier), and it is enabled by default (Systemd calls it after waking up from a suspend). Do enable nvidia-suspend and/or nvidia-hibernate .

Driver persistence

Nvidia has a daemon that can be optionally run at boot. In a standard single-GPU X desktop environment the persistence daemon is not needed and can actually create issues [8]. See the Driver Persistence section of the Nvidia documentation for more details.

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How to adjust NVIDIA GPU power usage on linux

Created: Nov 14, 2016

Introduction

On linux when using NVIDIA GPUs for scientific computation or crypto mining is normal to find that fan speed is not high enough to lower the core temperature. We found two ways to low the GPU temperature and we discuss the solutions in this article.

As an example, room temperature is 29C and after execute EWBF’s CUDA Zcash miner for 5 minutes you will see high temps like:

As you can see the GPU0 temp is 81C and the miner software stopped the computing.

Solution 1: Limit power usage (very usefull for mining)

It’s a common practice when mining to lower the power usage, since it has a low impact in the mining performance. In the next command we lower the power limit to 85w. Make sure you set the limit to a proper value, in our case we had a GTX1060.

First command is for persistance. After lowering the limit we manage to mine at 72C.

The problem with this solution is low performance on computing, for crypto currency mining this could be a positive side since the impact is low. For scientific computing this could be very negative.

Solution 2: Use nvidia-settings (requires X)

If you are running X (no headless) you can try to set the GPUFanControlState and then the GPUTargetFanSpeed to 100.

The good thing of this solution is that you will not loose performance, but you will lower the expected life of fans (they will run 100%). For crypto this is negative, since we want the best performance per watt. However changing the speed of the fan in scientific computing will allow more performance which translates to less computing time for simulations.

Appendix

ERROR: Error querying enabled displays on GPU 0 (Missing Extension)

Try the following command to solve the querying error.

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