The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 1:28 UTC (Mon) by motk (guest, #51120)
Parent article: The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Major problem for me with the Nouveau driver is that the binary driver also does fan management. Without it, the card fans just blast away at full speed, and they're _loud_. There's some tickets in about it, but nobody seems to care much about it.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 7:53 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (4 responses)

> There's some tickets in about it, but nobody seems to care much about it.

With the kernel 3.3 there is manual fan management (see this commit).

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 8:31 UTC (Mon) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems unlikely that the fan management can be used safely without proper thermal measurements to back its policies?

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 16:32 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

That probably depends on whether you believe you understand your usage profile (if the box just sits there running a terminal window it's hard to imagine how that would generate enough heat to need fans running at high speed) and whether nVidia's hardware responds to overheat conditions by catching fire, suffering permanent damage, shutting down until reset or just automatically reducing clock speeds.

After all there _are_ sensors, the only issue is how much the local firmware on the device does. It might (like many modern CPUs) be capable of protecting itself from excess temperature no matter how bad the cooling is. In that case incorrectly setting the fan speed would at worst result in a sudden loss of picture as the GPU shuts off abruptly, a "learning opportunity" for the operator, and a good reason for Nouveau to keep working on this problem, but not really dangerous.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 27, 2012 11:57 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Phoronix was at the FOSDEM 2012 talk about the Nouveau driver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tNeVp7lMAo#t=43m13s

The URL should skip to where they talk about powermanagement/fans.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 29, 2012 7:19 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

If you don't have temperature driven fan management (which I think remains the best way to control fans), the safe thing to do is what overclockers do:

- find suitable stress test programs that drive both CPU and GPU as hard as possible
- manually adjust the fan speeds until temperature is within safe limits for both CPU and GPU - maybe go for 10-15C below maximums to allow for really hot weather up to 40C, depending on current room temperature

This will be noisier than a temperature driven fan setup, of course - this may help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_Speed_Control - and many laptops have specific fan control tools. GkrellM and other tools report fan speeds from GPU as well as CPU.