GeForce GTX 900 Series Re-Clocking Patches Updated By Karol Herbst

Frequent Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver contributor Karol Herbst has posted his latest patch series in working towards GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell 2" graphics processor re-clocking.

The 32 patches posted on Thursday are an updated version of the work he originally posted back in September. While it's working on the GTX 900 series re-clocking, due to NVIDIA not yet providing the signed PMU firmware, it's quite limited in its ability.

Because of this, the current re-clocking code provided by these patches is just intended for manually re-clocking your GPU if using a laptop, if your graphics card is fanless, or if you are using externally-controlled fans on your graphics card for cooling. Basically, this reclocking only works out if the GPU isn't in charge of adjusting fan speeds, etc.

These patches are also only limited to Maxwell2 and not the newer GTX 1000 "Pascal" graphics cards. It's the GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" and GTX 750 "Maxwell 1" graphics cards that have the best but still manual re-clocking support with the Nouveau driver.

These patches by Karol also work on thermal policy handling, changing boost modes, limiting clocks if it's a laptop running on battery, etc. Those interested in this work can find the Nouveau DRM patches on the Nouveau mailing list. We'll see if it gets into shape for merging into Linux 4.16 or if it remains out-of-tree until the overall Pascal re-clocking state is in better shape and more reliable/trustworthy.