[arch-general] xf86-video-nv question

Stefan Wilkens stefanwilkens at gmail.com
Sun Jan 15 05:25:53 EST 2012


2012/1/15 Don Juan <donjuansjiz at gmail.com>:
> Does anyone know how to control the nvidia fan when using this driver? Its
> the only thing I am not able to figure out and my video card starts getting
> really hot after a bit. I have tried sensors and it does not detect
> anything(fan related). I also did the pci prog, cant remember the name off
> hand not on my arch box right now. I know the CPU fans are GPIO fans, does
> that mean the nvidia one is as well and I can not control it? Keeping it on
> a cooling pad keeps things cool enough, but I would really prefer to keep
> using this driver for the time being with all the Xorg issues with the
> proprietary drivers, and I honestly think the nouveau ones are worse than
> the proprietary, NV has never let me down minus the heat issue on this one
> laptop.
>
> Card: GeForce 360m
>
> Thanks for your time

It seems likely that your card's power management features aren't
supported by the -nv driver, NVIDIA dropped support for that in 2010
and no longer support the open source efforts. At the moment of
dropping, the -nv drivers lacked proper randr, KMS and powersave
support. I would say that you're simply running into the limitations
of a somewhat outdated driver.

Nouveau is slowly catching up and is supporting powersave features for
newer models, but it's touch and go. You card is of the NV50 family,
nouveau's PowerManagement feature Wiki[1] mentions support for
frequency scaling to be "MOSTLY" done and fan speed to be "WIP".

[1] http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/PowerManagement

You could try if the "mostly done" engine and memory re-clocking in
its current state is enough to resolve your heat issues, but you may
have to jump to the nvidia binary blob to have reliable power
management.


More information about the arch-general mailing list