search

jsalatas / plasma-pstate

Intel P-state and CPUFreq Manager Widget
GNU General Public License v2.0
274 stars 49 forks source link

Applet will spam "modprobe nvidia" if nvidia driver is nouveau #46

Closed jroovy closed 4 years ago

jroovy commented 4 years ago

The pstate applet appears to be trying to load the nvidia driver if nouveau is installed and in use

System specs Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.17.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.66.0 Qt Version: 5.14.1 Kernel Version: 5.3.13-zen1-1-zen OS Type: 64-bit Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz Memory: 11.5 GiB of RAM

How to reproduce the issue: 1) Install the nvidia drivers (I installed the nvidia-dkms package) 2) Compile and install this: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/optimus-manager/ 3) Using optimus-manager, set the default GPU to Intel GPU 4) Install the applet and enable it 5) Open htop and you will see modprobe nvidia running indefinitely

The only way to prevent this issue from occuring is: 1) Using optimus-manager, change the default GPU to nvidia (not ideal for running on battery) 2) Disable nvidia gpu from BIOS (some BIOSes might not support this

Extract the file to /etc/optimus-manager/ then reboot for changes to take effect optimus-manager.conf.zip

If the above config file does not work try experimenting with the options presented here: https://github.com/Askannz/optimus-manager/wiki/A-guide--to-power-management-options

jsalatas commented 4 years ago

It seems to me that the issue is that the optimus-manager requires proprietary nvidia drivers to run. Please have a look the the README file. It clearly mentions the following

Naturally, you must have the proprietary nvidia driver installed on your system. On Archlinux, you can use the packages nvidia or nvidia-dkms

jroovy commented 4 years ago

I already have the nvidia-dkms driver installed when installing the applet. What i meant is that the applet detects the nvidia driver and tries to modprobe it while the nouveau driver is in use.

Optimus-manager turns off the nvidia gpu (switches to nouveau) when the Intel GPU is in use. The applet tries to enable/display powermizer by modprobing the proprietary nvidia driver.

jsalatas commented 4 years ago

If that's the case then I guess that the widget is incompatible with optimus-manager. If you could send a patch that fixes it then I would be happy to merge it.

jsalatas commented 4 years ago

BTW: I just had a look at optimus-manager wiki at https://github.com/Askannz/optimus-manager/wiki/A-guide--to-power-management-options#configuration-2--pci-power-control

in section "Configuration 2 : PCI power control" explains some issues with your configuration and proposes ways to fix these.

jroovy commented 4 years ago

I would love to contribute a patch; unfortunately, I don't know how to code. And it appears that adding these lines: pci_power_control=yes pci_remove=yes and deleting switching=nouveau solved the problem for me :)

(However I think this issue should be kept open since the solution above might not work for all nvidia laptops)

jsalatas commented 4 years ago

I'm glad that your issue is fixed. Since closed issues are searchable, I guess I'll close it :)

jroovy commented 4 years ago

UPDATE: Well technically it did solve the issue but now it's trying to run nvidia-settings -q GpuPowerMizerMode even when the nvidia gpu is removed from pci

jroovy commented 4 years ago

Could you add a condition/check that prevents the applet from querying powermizer if an nvidia gpu is not present?

jsalatas commented 4 years ago

Could you add a condition that prevents the applet from querying powermizer if an nvidia gpu is not present?

How would you do that? How you would detect in your system whether the nvidia gpu is not loaded? In any case you would need run a command to detect it. Right? So you would still have a command running. It would just not be nvidia-settings but something other. Will that make any difference to you?

jroovy commented 4 years ago

I guess you're right; adding extra code would just complicate things more. I guess the best way for now would be to rename the nvidia-settings binary to something else to prevent the querying from happening. The nvidia driver technically doesnt need the nvidia-settings GUI to operate properly so I guess this issue can be closed :)