Solus and Reducing Power usage of Dual GPU Laptops

[Guest]

Hello, everyone.  I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with the world.  

In case you are using the Solus (Linux) distribution with a dual GPU computer (and the GPUs happen to be Nvidia and Intel), then you may have noticed that, particularly on laptops, the Nvidia GPU can drain your battery, and you may not have that much use for the graphics power anyway (I certainly did not).  The solution that worked for me (despite what forums and Reddit and Fedora people will tell you about Noveau) may be found in the PDF document I have provided (along with all terminal commands and the like).  That being said, if you happen to have a machine configuration where this will cause you to brick your machine, please do not blame me.  It is done AT YOUR OWN RISK - that being said, if you have time and do not have sensitive data that needs to be backed up on your Solus partition, feel free to experiment - I think this solution will work.

 

Do note: When installing Solus for a dual boot system, it is recommended you disconnect the Windows 10 drive from the system ENTIRELY before installing Solus on a separate drive, because Microsoft has an aggressive partitioning scheme that will spread on multiple disks and cause havoc if not isolated.

Do Note: To run Solus in root mode (necessary for procedure), just type "su" in terminal, hit Enter, and then enter admin password.  This should work (and it is necessary to do this as sudo does not grant root access by default like other distros).

 

Note on personal experience: It genuinely worked for me.  Power was reduced from 11W to about 4.5W on an idle desktop.  Google Chrome is a heavy power consumer, and if you can avoid Google Docs, I would recommend using gedit text editor in dark theme to take notes (saves a lot of power to do so).

 

Disabling Nvidia Card and Removing Shutdown Failure.pdf

 

Edit: Idle desktop as in idle desktop on the laptop.

[Guest]

Well this just disables the GPU by blacklisting it's driver, but there are other ways to do that

On ubuntu you just install the proprietary driver, which has native support, and on other distros you install bbswitch + bumblebee which have the required ACPI commands to disable the second GPU 

This is a very odd approach

[Guest]

On 12/19/2018 at 6:26 AM, Lukyp said:

Well this just disables the GPU by blacklisting it's driver, but there are other ways to do that

On ubuntu you just install the proprietary driver, which has native support, and on other distros you install bbswitch + bumblebee which have the required ACPI commands to disable the second GPU 

This is a very odd approach

Blacklisting Noveau does not actually work in this case; tried and tested with power measurements, was still at 10+ watts after other methods attempted

[Guest]

2 hours ago, VPrime said:

Blacklisting Noveau does not actually work in this case; tried and tested with power measurements, was still at 10+ watts after other methods attempted

Even with bumblebee? 

Because probably the card remains powered up even with the kernel module disabled on some buggy acpi laptopts, still bumblebbe should replace the manual acpi ovveride thing, or even tlp

 

[toeknife]

On 12/19/2018 at 6:35 PM, VPrime said:

Hello, everyone.  I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with the world.  

In case you are using the Solus (Linux) distribution with a dual GPU computer (and the GPUs happen to be Nvidia and Intel), then you may have noticed that, particularly on laptops, the Nvidia GPU can drain your battery, and you may not have that much use for the graphics power anyway (I certainly did not).  The solution that worked for me (despite what forums and Reddit and Fedora people will tell you about Noveau) may be found in the PDF document I have provided (along with all terminal commands and the like).  That being said, if you happen to have a machine configuration where this will cause you to brick your machine, please do not blame me.  It is done AT YOUR OWN RISK - that being said, if you have time and do not have sensitive data that needs to be backed up on your Solus partition, feel free to experiment - I think this solution will work.

 

Do note: When installing Solus for a dual boot system, it is recommended you disconnect the Windows 10 drive from the system ENTIRELY before installing Solus on a separate drive, because Microsoft has an aggressive partitioning scheme that will spread on multiple disks and cause havoc if not isolated.

Do Note: To run Solus in root mode (necessary for procedure), just type "su" in terminal, hit Enter, and then enter admin password.  This should work (and it is necessary to do this as sudo does not grant root access by default like other distros).

 

Note on personal experience: It genuinely worked for me.  Power was reduced from 11W to about 4.5W on an idle desktop.  Google Chrome is a heavy power consumer, and if you can avoid Google Docs, I would recommend using gedit text editor in dark theme to take notes (saves a lot of power to do so).

 

Disabling Nvidia Card and Removing Shutdown Failure.pdf 70.57 kB · 12 downloads

 

Edit: Idle desktop as in idle desktop on the laptop.

Hey can you reupload the attachment please? I would really appreciate it. Thanks