Completely turn off nvidia gpu

[LoafingBunny]

Hi, today I managed to turn off the nvidia gpu, so as to have a power consumption of ~8W as reported by powertop. When the gpu is on, the power used is ~15W so effectively reducing by half the battery time.

I'm not totally sure how, can be many factors, I'll try to describe them here also as a reminder for me

So, first of all, update the kernel (5.0.0-25-generic) and the nvidia driver (430.26):

I removed bumblebee and bbswitch.

Blacklist all modules related to nvidia as described here : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9570#Manually_loading/unloading_NVIDIA_module Because I'm using wayland I didn't care about the x11 settings. I copy the three files required:

# /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ipmi.conf

install ipmi_msghandler /usr/bin/false
install ipmi_devintf /usr/bin/false

# /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nvidia.conf

install nvidia /bin/false

# /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist nouveau
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv
blacklist nv
blacklist nvidia
blacklist nvidia-drm
blacklist nvidia-modeset
blacklist nvidia-uvm
blacklist ipmi_msghandler
blacklist ipmi_devintf

ok, now when the gpu is on (power usage high) you can remove it with this command:

tee /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:01\:00.0/remove <<<1 alternatively also work to remove all the related nvidia modules:

rmmod nvidia-drm
rmmod nvidia-uvm
rmmod nvidia-modeset
rmmod nvidia

Now the gpu is off, as you should see from powertop. To re-enable it at any time, first rescan

tee /sys/bus/pci/rescan <<<1

now when I call nvidia-smi it automatically loads the drivers too, and the gpu turns on. Note that some additional fine tuning might be required, but everything is written in the link.