On 12/02/23 Marc MERLIN wrote:
Howdy,
Howdy!
I'm trying a Thnkpad P17 gen2, the last thinkpad that still comes in 17"
4K (newer ones are 16" only, so I'm looking for other worthwhile linux
laptops with 17" or bigger LCD that also does 4K, the alienware I saw
was 18" but not 4K)
Unfortunately I seem to need the nouveau driver to turn off the nvidia
chip I don't plan on using (intel graphics is fine for me), and bios
only allows 'bybrid' or nvidia only)
On my P73, nouveau never really worked in the 3 years I've had it, but
it could at least turn off the nvidia chip. On P17gen2 it does not seem
to be able to do so.
At the moment you'd have to use the proprietary Nvidia driver for
graphics support. But there are, and have been for a long time, ways to
disable the additional dedicated graphics device completely and save
power, which is nice thing on a laptop...
sauron:~# lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-H GT1 [UHD Graphics] (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA104GLM [RTX A5000 Mobile] (rev a1)
Note the Nvidia card's PCI address is 01:00.0...
What is the next recommended step?
STEP #1: disable nouveau by blacklisting the module.
There's more than one way to do this:
* Add it to /etc/modprobe.d/<someconfigfilename>.conf
E.g. /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf, run in a root shell (if the
file doesn't already exist!):
echo "blacklist nouveau" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
* Add a kernel command line parameter: modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
How you do this depends on which Linux (distribution) you're running.
E.g. GRUB's command line may be used, if GRUB /is/ used, or dracut and
so on...
STEP #2: you could power down the PCI device (only after you've disabled
the driver in step #1).
Try it out first by disabling the PCI device you noted above on a
running system (as root!), e.g. like this:
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:01\:00.0/remove
If that works, you'd do something like adding a new udev rule in e.g.
/etc/udev/rules.d/00-remove-nvidia.rules with contents of the sort:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{vendor}=="0x10de",
ATTR{class}=="0x03[0-9]*", ATTR{power/control}="auto", ATTR{remove}="1"
Take a full example from the Arch Wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hybrid_graphics
Other resouces:
https://github.com/bayasdev/nvidia-gpu-off
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/702774/how-to-disable-pcie-device-at-boot
Thanks,
Marc
Welcome! Hope this helps, and I also hope it's not too late. I just saw
your posting and thought, better late than never...
Linux User #330250
