No support for power management

[dronus]

With Ubuntu 11.10 beta, the Lenovo T61 with Nvidia gpu chipset NV86 runs hot and has bad battery live. As 'top' shows no evidence for unusual cpu load, I tink this is due to exceptional gpu load in idle or bad gpu power management. On ubuntu versions using the nvidia binary driver the machine stays cold and fan off almost any time on idle.

I know nouveau is not really finished but until it is it should not be the default driver as that would give a very bad user experience. So I'd liked to file this bug against the oneiric distribution but ended up here.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

There still is no power management support for nouveau, and no idea when that would change.

[Matthew Hall (mhall-9)]

Hey, this bug is quite serious and does not seem to be getting much attention.

It was causing crashing and overheating on my HP 8510w. It would be nice if the old 2D only "nv" driver could be supported in addition to nouveau as that driver did not cause nearly as much of an issue.

If nothing will be fixed then at least the workaround should be made clearly available. I had to disassemble the system and look for broken / hot components to find the cause of the issues.

[lcampagn (luke-campagnola)]

I agree; my bug #1037388 (marked duplicate to this one) describes the same experience. There are a few machines for which this driver should be excluded by default.

[dronus (paul-geisler)]

Well I think it is clearly an important issue, even if only some machines overheat to failure, almost all mobile machines with nvidia suffer from bad battery mileage and unneeded fan noise.

[dozer (matthew-pocock)]

Since I upgraded my ubuntu install and it reverted to the nuveau driver, my nvidia card regularly crashes due to overheating. More than once a day. This is a serious issue. It sometimes takes out not only X by the entire computer. Not to mention my electricity bills. Please fix.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Nouveau fan management is now available in the linux kernel, but it is disabled by default for safety reasons. The developers are considering enabling it by default in the 3.12 kernel. In the meantime, see http://cgit.freedesktop.org/nouveau/linux-2.6/tree/Documentation/thermal/nouveau_thermal

[dronus (paul-geisler)]

I think it is totally ok for a driver in development to not support power management until "it is done".

But it IS very bad idea to ship this not-ready driver to the users for a publisher like Ubuntu that targets a general audience. It just gives a bad user experience to thousands. And Ubuntu is not ashamed of shipping proprietary binary drivers, so for the nVidia drivers this would be very useful to continue shipping the binary driver until Nouveau does power management well.