Turning off Arc A370M at runtime on Linux.

[jiriks74]

Hello,

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro with Arc A370M.

I've been struggling with power consumption until today - I've turned the dGPU off in the UEFI and I finally got the consumption from about 20W to 9-10W - doubling my battery life.

I'm currently looking for a way to turn it off at runtime as rebooting is quite annoying - save all work, reboot, reopen all work again.

I've tried to use the acpi_call example script at 

/usr/share/acpi_call/examples/turn_off_gpu.sh

to turn it off but everything failed. The output is here.

It would be really helpful if I could turn it off at runtime.

[Jean_Intel]

Hello jiriks74,

Thank you for posting in the Intel Communities. We understand that you are trying to lower the power consumption of your system to extend the battery life of your laptop, so you are looking for an option to turn off the GPU at runtime. We will be more than glad to assist you; however, we would like to research this issue internally to answer your question more appropriately. We will be posting back as soon as we have more details.

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello jiriks74,

We would like to jump into your thread, as it is important to let you know that there is no ideal power consumption, especially since this is a laptop and the manufacturer might have configured this differently. However, we will continue to look into your issue internally, and we will post back as soon as we have more details about your concern.

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[jiriks74]

Thanks. I understand that there is no ideal power consumption.

The problem is that the laptop was using about 19-23W when idling. When I went to the UEFI and manually turned the dGPU off that way the IDLE power consumption dropped to 8-10W. When it's in use it's now about 9-11W (playing YouTube, saving discord in tr background, etc).
Now I'm getting around 6-7 hrs of battery life (instead of 2-3) which is more in line with what I'd expect when the manufacturer says it's up to 12 hrs (it's always about half the specified battery life).

All of this leads me to believe that the Intel drivers for the Arc dGPUs don't turn off/clock down the dGPU when there's nothing runnin on it.

I know that NVIDIA can be turned off manually and AMD turns the dGPU on/off automatically (people say that it sometimes turns on while it's not in use costing some battery life) but I haven't heard anything at all about Intel Arc dGPUs having the ability to be turned off manually or automatically (in Linux).

So I think that the drivers should be looked at or the ACPI calls for turning it on/off should be published so that people can develop their own tools to manage the dGPUs.

[Jean_Intel]

Hello jiriks74,

Thank you for providing us with more details about your issue. We understand your concern and appreciate your feedback. However, could you please specify the Linux distribution you are currently using?

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[jiriks74]

Because the drivers are basically in beta (I guess as there are still many issues with this dGPU on Linux) I'm on EndeavourOS (basically Arch Linux) so that I have the newest Linux kernel and Mesa drivers. I use the linux-zen kernel that Arch Linux provides but I've been testing the dGPU with the regular kernel as well - both acted the same.

Distribution: EndeavourOS (Arch Linux)

Kernel version: 6.6.7
Mesa version: 1:23.3.1

[Jean_Intel]

Hello jiriks74,

Thank you for the information provided. We will continue to look into this matter internally, and we will post back as soon as we have more details about this issue.

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Jean_Intel]

Hello jiriks74,

Thank you for your patience, after looking into this matter, we would like to let you know that only have drivers for Ubuntu* 22.04, additional Linux distributions are not supported at this time. We recommend you contact the Linux Distribution for further assistance.

Based on this, we will proceed to close this thread now. If you need additional information, submit a new question, as this thread will no longer be monitored.

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician