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Antonin
Asked: 2018-06-05 14:14:50 +0800 CST

Nouveau blacklisted but loaded

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Hi I am trying to use Ubuntu-Prime for ubuntu 18 on an asus laptop with 2 GPU (intel & nvidia).

I found the power consumption of the computer to be way too high when I reboot with only the intel GPU (using prime-select intel or using nvidia-settings).

I found that the nouveau driver was loaded despite normally not used:

$ gpu-manager | grep nouveau
Is nouveau loaded? yes
Is nouveau blacklisted? yes
Skipping "/dev/dri/card1", driven by "nouveau"
Skipping "/dev/dri/card1", driven by "nouveau"
Found "/dev/dri/card1", driven by "nouveau"
Skipping "/dev/dri/card1", driven by "nouveau"

I tried to blacklist it and also have a kernel startup option to prevent nouveau from being loaded yet it still loads. This seems very un-linuxy to me.

nouveau modprobe 18.04 nvidia-prime

2 Answers

  1. I found a way to disable nouveau and get my battery life back when using prime with intel graphic card :

    2 bugs in Ubuntu 18 are concerned :

    1. Prime fails to turn off discrete GPU (known issue).

    Make sure that your discrete GPU is connected to PCI port 0000:01:00.0 (using lspci -vnn | grep '\''[030[02]\]' for instance)

    Change /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service.wants/nvidia-prime-boot.service and replace the current execstart (referencing vgaswitcheroo which is not usually available by ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/power/control'")

    2. nvidia-fallback loads nouveau when nvidia is not loaded

    Even if we are willing not to use the discrete gpu !

    Disable the following service which loads nouveau driver when nvidia driver is not loaded : sudo systemctl disable nvidia-fallback.service

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  2. For anyone suffering with this: I was just about to try Antonin's solution but didn't need to after installing prime 0.8.8.1 from bionic-proposed. I had the nouveau issue with nvidia-390/restricted, nvidia-prime/main, nvidia-settings/main. Currently using nvidia-396 from graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu.

    system: Dell Precision 7730 on 18.04 w/ Intel i915 and Quadro P4200

    Assuming bionic-proposed and graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu are enabled:

    sudo apt purge nvidia* && sudo apt autoremove --purge  
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-396 nvidia-prime/bionic-proposed nvidia-settings

    *reboot

    Now prime-select no longer triggers a grub update or loads nouveau. And nvidia-fallback.service seems to have vanished.

    gpu-manager | grep nouveau

    returns

    /etc/modprobe.d is not a file
    /etc/modprobe.d is not a file
    /etc/modprobe.d is not a file
    /etc/modprobe.d is not a file
    Is nouveau loaded? no
    Is nouveau blacklisted? no

    and lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 VGA

    00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:3e94]
    Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0832]
    Kernel driver in use: i915

    01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:1bb9] (rev a1)
    Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0832]
    Kernel driver in use: nvidia

    Previously nouveau was loaded for 01:00.0

    nvidia-prime 0.8.8.1

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