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):
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.
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:
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: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.