Nouveau Driver Gets Fan Control Modes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Driver Gets Fan Control Modes

There's some fan/thermal-related commits hitting the Nouveau driver's DRM repository...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE5MzQ

[Plombo]

Hooray for fan management! I don't even know what kind of fan I have, but any tangible advances in Nouveau's power/thermal management actually landing in the kernel is very welcome.

[tancrackers]

This sounds great! How do the nouveau drivers compare with the proprietary drivers? I wanna try them out on my HP touchsmart.

[Plombo]

This sounds great! How do the nouveau drivers compare with the proprietary drivers? I wanna try them out on my HP touchsmart.

Depends on your hardware. From my experience with my NVA5 (NV50/NVA3 generation), it works very well but has slower 3D performance and eats more power than the proprietary driver.

[AJenbo]

It just hit me that running Nouveau will probably wear you fan out compared to the proprietary driver, all in an attempt to avoid over heating They better get that fan controll working automatic soon

[Veerappan]

It just hit me that running Nouveau will probably wear you fan out compared to the proprietary driver, all in an attempt to avoid over heating They better get that fan controll working automatic soon

Well, if they can handle manual fan control + thermal sensors, I don't see why an automatic fan management mode couldn't be slapped together based on temperature thresholds (either system or user-defined).

[LightBit]

It just hit me that running Nouveau will probably wear you fan out compared to the proprietary driver, all in an attempt to avoid over heating They better get that fan controll working automatic soon

My 8800GT fan is very quiet with Nouveau (more quiet than on Windows) and temperature seems fine.
It seems my GPU is controlling fan by itself.

[bofh80]

nvidia auto thermal is terrible.

constantly have to put the coolbits on and pump up the fan to 50 or 60%. then on idle it's 60 C or so

if i leave it on the nvidia AUTO mode default is 40%, it idles at 70 C or so, and the fan moves up to 50% at 85 C lol. toastiee

it was hotter @ idle until i put some sa5 on there.

[AJenbo]

Would be grate if the fan control could learn about the system thermal an usage characteristics of to keep an on avarge low noise instead of constantly jumping between idle and max fan speed.

[MùPùF]

Well, if they can handle manual fan control + thermal sensors, I don't see why an automatic fan management mode couldn't be slapped together based on temperature thresholds (either system or user-defined).

Right. The only reason the code has not been pushed is .... that I didn't have the time to fix my patch following the nouveau maintainer's comments before going on vacation. The code is available but won't be merged in Nouveau until I get back home which should be in a few days.
Hopefully, the thermal work will be almost done for most cards when I'm done merging the patches.

However, please test the code extensively. We never know what strange clock tree nvidia could have introduced on some chispets!