kubuntu 14.10 plasma 5 spins up PowerMizer

Bug #1397178 reported by Mitch Golden
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xorg (Ubuntu)
Expired
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

I have installed 14.10 Plasma 5 on my laptop, which is a vintage 2011
System 76.  Of greatest significance is that it has an nvidia 560M
graphics card in it.

When I first installed 14.04, I noticed that the PowerMizer report of the
NVIDIA X Server Settings would report that the graphics chip's clock was
more or less constantly spun up to its highest clock rate.  Heat and power
use were very high, and I constantly heard the fan running.

I found there were two ways to fix this:

(1) Add a file called 05-nvidia.conf to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d
containing the lines:

Section "Device"
     Identifier     "Device0"
     Driver         "nvidia"
     VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
     Option         "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3"
EndSection

This pegged the graphics card at its lowest possible clock rate, which was
adequate for most things but sometimes led to bad playback on some videos.

See: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/410089-nvidia-powermizer-how-tweak

(2) Revert to the 304 driver.  This still spun up to high clock rates a
bit more often than it seemed to need to, but was fairly reasonable
otherwise.

I expected that this would soon be rectified, since I saw that version
337.25 of the driver allegedly fixed some issue with performance in KDE:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/76278/en-us

Jump ahead to yesterday when I installed 14.10 plasma 5 -

I noticed that even with the 304 driver the PowerMizer reported the clock
at its highest rate.  With nothing moving on the screen at all and my not
touching the mouse, it was pegged.

I found that even installing the xorg-edgers driver (340 I believe) had no
effect.  Furthermore, 340 did not respond to the xorg.conf settings file
above.  The only way I can get plasma 5 to run reasonably on this machine
is to revert to 304 and *also* put the settings file in.  This is of
course not optimal.

Is there some way to determine what exactly is happening that causes the
graphics clock to spin up so high? Nothing much is happening. Just
scrolling a window in firefox is sufficient to start it.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: xorg 1:7.7+7ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-25.33-generic 3.16.7
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-25-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Fri Nov 28 00:00:27 2014
SourcePackage: xorg
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

Revision history for this message
Mitch Golden (mgolden) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Mitch Golden (mgolden) wrote :

Sorry, I see that this bug is a duplicate of 1394856 which has already been transferred to xorg.

Revision history for this message
penalvch (penalvch) wrote :

Mitch Golden, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg 1397178

Please ensure you have xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes button for attaching additional debugging information.

As well, given the information from the prior release is already available, testing a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

Changed in xorg (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Mitch Golden (mgolden) wrote : Re: [Bug 1397178] Re: kubuntu 14.10 plasma 5 spins up PowerMizer

I tried two nights ago to install the alpha 2 but was unable to do it.
When I tried, ubiqity was starting the bouncing cursor and then stopping.
When I did the command from the shell, I found that it was failing to
delete a file called polkit-inhibit (sorry, forgot the directory for the
moment). I haven't had a chance to file a bug, will do in the next day or
so.

I will try in the next week or so with this build.

   - Mitch Golden

On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Christopher M. Penalver wrote:

> Mitch Golden, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been
> any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an
> issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development
> release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from
> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .
>
> If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in
> the development release from a Terminal as it will automatically gather
> and attach updated debug information to this report:
>
> apport-collect -p xorg 1397178
>
> Please ensure you have xdiagnose installed, and that you click the Yes
> button for attaching additional debugging information.
>
> As well, given the information from the prior release is already
> available, testing a release prior to the development one would not be
> helpful.
>
> Thank you for your understanding.
>
> Helpful bug reporting tips:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs
>
> ** Changed in: xorg (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Undecided => Low
>
> ** Changed in: xorg (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1397178
>
> Title:
> kubuntu 14.10 plasma 5 spins up PowerMizer
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1397178/+subscriptions
>

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

[Expired for xorg (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Changed in xorg (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Expired
Revision history for this message
Mitch Golden (mgolden) wrote :

I didn't get the time to test this in the last two months. It is actually a fairly serious project as it requires a fairly lengthy install. However, as it is now time to upgrade to 15.04, I will get on it this weekend.

Changed in xorg (Ubuntu):
status: Expired → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

[Expired for xorg (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Changed in xorg (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Expired
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