Nouveau Gets Thermal Throttling, One Step Closer For GTX 900 Re-Clocking

Nouveau re-clocking/power expert Karol Herbst has published a set of patches today implementing thermal throttling support for this open-source NVIDIA DRM driver.

Herbst has implemented support for thermal throttling on NVIDIA Kepler GPUs and newer (GeForce GTX 600 and beyond). This allows for reducing the clock speeds of the GPU if a thermal threshold is reached, in order to prevent overheating orT damaging the GPU.

With this implemented, Karol believes it's safe to add support for Maxwell2 re-clocking while hidden behind a switch as it would still be experimental and NVIDIA has yet to release any PMU firmware for allowing proper re-clocking with the GTX 900 series (as well as the GTX 1000 Pascal series).

Currently, Karol has hacked experimental GTX 900 "Maxwell2" re-clocking on one of his Git branches. Karol explained that his current re-clocking support should be sane for GTX 900 series laptop users as the GPU doesn't control the fan, but for desktop graphics cards, they aren't yet able to control the fans due to the PMU firmware and thus could be unsafe. Basically, both GTX 900/1000 series hardware on this open-source driver will remain crippled until NVIDIA steps up with PMU firmware and/or additional technical assistance to Nouveau developers.

The 13 patches for implementing thermal throttling within Nouveau DRM can be found via the Nouveau list. This is hopefully also one more step getting closer towards allowing auto re-clocking with Nouveau.