Hi,
I’m struggling with finding a way to control Nvidia power management on a Linux machine that runs in headless configuration (i.e. without running X server) with a Quadro K4000 or a GTX Titan.
Problem:
It can be observed in benchmarks that -starting from idle- CUDA compute performance is pretty slow for tens of milliseconds before the “normal” performance is achieved. Using nvidia-settings or nvidia-smi shows that the cards are initially in minimum-clock state and it takes some time before they switch to full-clock state.
This bothers me because I’m developing a CUDA application with real-time constraints and I want to have deterministic timing behaviour (as far as possible using CUDA…).
What I want to do:
Disable the clock reduction to have immediate full compute performance.
What I tried so far:
I know that this can be done e.g. with
nvidia-settings -a [gpu:n]/GpuPowerMizerMode=1
however nvidia-settings uses the NV-CONTROL X extension and hence requires a running X server.
Then I tried nvidia-smi, but it was unsuccesful. Maybe those commands are supported on Tesla cards only and not on desktop (Quadro, Geforce) cards?
$nvidia-smi -i 0 --application-clocks=2808,810
Setting applications clocks is not supported for GPU 0000:42:00.0.
Treating as warning and moving on.
All done.
$ nvidia-smi -i 0 --gom=1
GOM mode cannot be changed on GPU 0000:42:00.0.
Treating as warning and moving on.
All done.
So I was looking for a way to influence power management via kernel module parameters. In /usr/src/nvidia-340-340.29/nv-reg.h I discovered:
/*
* Option: RegistryDwords
*
* Description:
*
* This option accepts a semicolon-separated list of key=value pairs. Each
* key name is checked agains the table of static options; if a match is
* found, the static option value is overridden, but invalid options remain
* invalid. Pairs that do not match an entry in the static option table
* are passed on to the RM directly.
*
* Format:
*
* NVreg_RegistryDwords="<key=value>;<key=value>;..."
*/
#define __NV_REGISTRY_DWORDS RegistryDwords
As one solution would be to set in the xorg.conf
Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefault=0x1;PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1"
my idea was to try to set these registry dwords on the kernel command line as module parameters and appended in the GRUB menu to the linux command line:
linux [...] NVreg_RegistryDwords="PowerMizerEnable=0x1;PerfLevelSrc=0x2222;PowerMizerDefault=0x1;PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1"
But unfortunately, this had no effect.
Any more ideas how to disable clock throttling without running an X server?