Turn Off Nvidia Quadro 4200

[jjjesss]

Hi all:

I'm struggling with this problem and I'm not able to fix it. In order to get the maximum power saving I followed the instructions of this well known article:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/TuningPowerConsumption

But I can't turn off the nvidia chip. My laptop is a Thinkpad T420s with and integrated Intel card and a discrete Nvidia GF119M 4200. To turn it off I do (with acpi_call loaded):

/usr/local/sbin/acpi_call -p "\_SB.PCI0.LPC.EC.PUBS._OFF" -o i

This method was found by the turn_off_gpu.sh (https://people.freebsd.org/~xmj/turn_off_gpu.sh)

Neither previous command nor turn_off_gpu.sh script the Nvidia is turn off.

Typing pciconf -lv the Nvidia is always detected.

I read about a similar case in this thread:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/34240/

clod89 user said he only was able to turn off the Nvidia once.

Any idea what can be happening? What am I doing bad?

Thanks in advance,

Jes

 

[jjjesss]

I forgot mentioning my system is FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p7 amd64. And, when the nvidia optimus is disabled in bios, and only integrated card is available, the power consumption is reduced from ~1380mw to ~890mw.

 

[Atsuri]

What is the problem, then? You switched off your nVidia Quadro card in the BIOS, but you cannot switch it off and need some additional scripting tricks?
You do have an nVidia Optimus laptop and as it is of older vintage, the BIOS ON/OFF toggle should be enough .

 

[jjjesss]

Yes, I can switch on/off in bios, but what I'm trying to obtain is with optimus mode activated in bios, get able to turn off the nvidia card. The laptop has another operating system that use Nvidia card. I'd prefer let bios untouched and be able to turn off the nvidia card in FreeBSD (if possible).

 

[Atsuri]

Yes, I can switch on/off in bios, but what I'm trying to obtain is with optimus mode activated in bios, get able to turn off the nvidia card. The laptop has another operating system that use Nvidia card. I'd prefer let bios untouched and be able to turn off the nvidia card in FreeBSD (if possible).

Alright, now I think I understand it better . GNU/Linux has a tool called Bumblebee, which works on laptops compatible with nVidia Optimus. The project itself is already quite old, though I remember using it on an Intel HD 3000 + nVidia GT 520 MX Samsung laptop. While FreeBSD does not have a working Bumblebee implementation, I would nevertheless look through the original Bumblebee project for GNU/Linux and see whether one can implement the respective C calls for the FreeBSD kernel. It's not trivial, that I can assure you .