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The NVIDIA Linux driver includes support for the suspend (suspend-to-RAM) and hibernate (suspend-to-disk) system power management operations, such as ACPI S3 and S4 on the x86_64 platform. When the system suspends or hibernates, the NVIDIA kernel drivers prepare in-use GPUs for the sleep cycle, saving state required to return these GPUs to normal operation when the system is later resumed. The NVIDIA Linux driver also supports S0ix-based s2idle system suspend (suspend-to-idle), if both the platform and the NVIDIA GPU support it.
The GPU state saved by the NVIDIA kernel drivers includes allocations made in video memory. However, these allocations are collectively large, and typically cannot be evicted. Since the amount of system memory available to drivers at suspend time is often insufficient to accommodate large portions of video memory, the NVIDIA kernel drivers are designed to act conservatively, and normally only save essential video memory allocations.
The resulting loss of video memory contents is partially compensated for by the user-space NVIDIA drivers, and by some applications, but can lead to failures such as rendering corruption and application crashes upon exit from power management cycles.
To better support power management with these types of applications, the NVIDIA Linux driver provides a custom power management interface intended for integration with system management tools like systemd. This interface is still considered experimental. It is not used by default, but can be taken advantage of by configuring the system as described in this chapter.
The NVIDIA Linux driver supports the suspend and hibernate power management operations via two different mechanisms. In this section, each is summarized briefly with its capabilities and requirements:
Kernel driver
callbackWhen this mechanism is used, the NVIDIA kernel driver receives callbacks from the Linux kernel to suspend, hibernate, and to resume each GPU for which a Linux PCI driver was registered. This is the default mechanism: it is enabled and used without explicit configuration.
While this mechanism has no special requirements, yields good results with many workloads, and has been supported by the NVIDIA kernel driver in similar form for years, it suffers from a few limitations. Notably, it can only preserve a relatively small amount of video memory reliably, and it cannot support power management when advanced CUDA features are being used.
/proc/driver/nvidia/suspendInstead of callbacks from the Linux kernel, this mechanism, when
used, relies on a system management tool, such as
systemd, to issue
suspend, hibernate, and resume commands to the NVIDIA kernel driver
via the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface. It
is still considered experimental, and requires explicit
configuration to use.
If configured correctly, this mechanism is designed to remove the limitations of the kernel driver callback mechanism. It supports power management with advanced CUDA features (such as UVM), and it is capable of saving and restoring all video memory allocations.
To save potentially large portions of video memory, the NVIDIA driver supports the following two methods:
Save
allocations in an unnamed temporary fileThe NVIDIA driver uses an unnamed temporary file to save
potentially large portions of video memory. By default, this file
is created in /tmp during system
suspend. This location can be changed with the NVreg_TemporaryFilePath nvidia.ko kernel
module parameter, e.g. NVreg_TemporaryFilePath=/run. The
destination file system needs to support unnamed temporary files,
and it needs to be large enough to accommodate all the utilized
video memory copies for the duration of the power management
cycle.
When determining a suitable size for the video memory backing
store, it is recommended to start with the overall amount of video
memory supported by the GPUs installed in the system. For example:
nvidia-smi -q -d MEMORY |grep 'FB
Memory Usage' -A1. Each Total line returned by this command
reflects one GPU's video memory capacity, in MiB. The sum of these
numbers, plus 5% of margin, is a conservative starting point for
the size of the video memory backing store.
Please note that file systems such as /tmp and /run are
often of the type tmpfs, and
potentially relatively small. Most commonly, the size of the type
of the file system used is controlled by systemd. For more information, see
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/APIFileSystems.
To achieve the best performance, file system types other than
tmpfs are recommended at this
time.
Additionally, to unlock the full functionality of the interface,
the NVIDIA Linux kernel module nvidia.ko needs to be loaded with the
NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1
module parameter. This changes the default video memory
save/restore strategy to save and restore all video memory
allocations. Also, the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend power
management mechanism (with a system management tool, such as
systemd) is required
for using this interface.
S0ix-based
power managementIf both the platform and the NVIDIA GPU support S0ix-based power management, then the NVIDIA Linux driver will put the GPU video memory in self refresh mode during s2idle system suspend. S0ix-based suspend will consume more power than legacy S3 system suspend, but it will enter and exit suspend/resume more quickly. Also, the suspend/resume latency will be constant irrespective of GPU video memory usage.
To check the platform S0ix state support and required configuration, follow the steps mentioned in how-achieve-s0ix-states-linux
To check if the NVIDIA GPU has support for S0ix-based power management, install the NVIDIA driver and run the following command:
grep 'Video Memory Self Refresh'
/proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/<Domain>:<Bus>:<Device>.0/power
For example:
grep 'Video Memory Self Refresh'
/proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/0000\:01\:00.0/power
If both the platform and the GPU support S0ix-based power
management, then the S0ix support can be enabled in the NVIDIA
Linux driver by setting the nvidia.ko kernel module parameter
NVreg_EnableS0ixPowerManagement
to "1". With NVreg_EnableS0ixPowerManagement set to "1"
and system suspend state set to s2idle, the NVIDIA Linux driver will
calculate the video memory usage at system suspend time.
During the S0ix suspend, if video memory usage is less than a certain threshold, then the driver will copy video memory contents to system memory and power off the video memory along with the GPU. This will help in saving power.
During the S0ix suspend, if video memory usage is above a certain threshold, then the video memory will be kept in self-refresh mode while the rest of the GPU is powered down.
By default, this threshold is 256 MB and it can be changed with
the NVreg_S0ixPowerManagementVideoMemoryThreshold
module parameter of nvidia.ko.
All the module parameters can be set on the command line when
loading the NVIDIA Linux kernel module nvidia.ko, or via the distribution's kernel
module configuration files (such as those under
/etc/modprobe.d).
This section is specific to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface. This is
required if using the NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1
kernel module parameter or advanced CUDA features (such as UVM).
The NVIDIA Linux kernel driver requires no configuration if the
default power management mechanism is used.
In order to take advantage of the /proc interface, a system management tool like
systemd needs to be
configured to access it at appropriate times in the power
management sequence. Specifically, the interface needs to be used
to suspend or hibernate the NVIDIA kernel drivers just before
writing to the Linux kernel's /sys/power/state interface to request entry into
the desired sleep state. The interface also needs to be used to
resume the NVIDIA kernel drivers immediately after the return from
a sleep state, as well as immediately after any unsuccessful
attempts to suspend or hibernate.
The following example configuration documents integration with the systemd system and service manager, which is commonly used in modern GNU/Linux distributions to manage system start-up and various aspects of its operation. For systems not using systemd, the configuration files provided serve as a reference.
The systemd configuration uses the following files:
/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-suspend.serviceA systemd service
description file used to instruct the system manager to write
suspend to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface immediately
before accessing /sys/power/state to
suspend the system.
/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-hibernate.serviceA systemd service
description file used to instruct the system manager to write
hibernate to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface immediately
before accessing /sys/power/state to
hibernate the system.
/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-resume.serviceA systemd service
description file used to instruct the system manager to write
resume to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface immediately
after returning from a system sleep state.
/lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidiaA systemd-sleep
script file used to instruct the system manager to write
resume to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface immediately
after an unsuccessful attempt to suspend or hibernate the system
via the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend
interface.
/usr/bin/nvidia-sleep.shA shell script used by the systemd service description files and the
systemd-sleep file to
interact with the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface. The script
also manages VT switching for the X server, which is currently
needed by the NVIDIA X driver to support power management
operations.
These files are installed and enabled by nvidia-installer automatically if systemd is detected. Installation of systemd units can be disabled by specifying the --no-systemd installer option.
This section is specific to the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend interface, when
configured as described above. When the default power management
mechanism is used instead, or when the /proc interface is used without
systemd, then the use
of systemctl is not
required.
To suspend (suspend-to-RAM) or to hibernate (suspend-to-disk), respectively, use the following commands:
sudo systemctl suspend
sudo systemctl hibernate
For the full list of sleep operations supported by systemd, please see the systemd-suspend.service(8) man page.
On some systems, where the default suspend mode is "s2idle", the system may not resume properly due
to a known timing issue in the kernel. The suspend mode can be
verified by reading the contents of the file /sys/power/mem_sleep. The following upstream
kernel changes have been proposed to fix the issue:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20190927090202.1468-1-drake@endlessm.com/
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20190821124519.71594-1-mika.westerberg@linux.intel.com/
In the interim, the default suspend mode on the affected systems
should be set to "deep" using the
kernel command line parameter "mem_sleep_default" -
mem_sleep_default=deep