Nvidia-powerd fails to start

Support
1

Hi,

For the first time I just installed a few packages and even without rebooting I ran nvidia-smi and it all worked !! Amazing experience, kudos to the team.

Of course that would be too easy for nvidia and linux though :smiley: so powerd fails to start resulting in a large idle power draw.

Aug 12 08:33:25 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Started nvidia-powerd.service - nvidia-powerd service.
Aug 12 08:33:25 localhost.localdomain nvidia-powerd[2301]: nvidia-powerd version:2.0 (build 1)
Aug 12 08:33:27 localhost.localdomain nvidia-powerd[2301]: DBus Connection is established
Aug 12 08:33:27 localhost.localdomain nvidia-powerd[2301]: ERROR! Running on an unsupported system (PCI device Id: 0x2705)
Aug 12 08:33:27 localhost.localdomain nvidia-powerd[2301]: Quit successfully
Aug 12 08:33:27 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: nvidia-powerd.service: Deactivated successfully.
Aug 12 08:33:27 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: nvidia-powerd.service: Consumed 1.389s CPU time, 1.2M memory peak.

NVIDIA-SMI 580.65.06
Driver Version: 580.65.06
CUDA Version: 13.0
kernel: 6.12.0-55.24.1.el10_0.x86_64

Any ideas?

2

After a second reboot, the power draw is down although the powerd service is still failing.

Now it’s idling at 5 watts rather than 37 from before, or at least that’s what nvidia-smi is reporting.

3

Hi there. It’s not really a bug—nvidia-powerd is designed only for laptops supporting NVIDIA’s Dynamic Boost feature. According to the official [Dynamic Boost on Linux README for driver 570.144], it works only under the following conditions:

  1. Laptop form factor
  2. Ampere or newer GPU
  3. Comet Lake or newer Intel chipset (or certain newer AMD chipsets)
  4. SBIOS support for Dynamic Boost

If any of these requirements aren’t met—especially the laptop hardware context—nvidia-powerd will exit with “unsupported system” and that’s expected. You can safely ignore or disable it. Here’s the official README for details:

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/570.144/README/dynamicboost.html

4

Hi @saurabhrawat!

You may encounter a common issue with nvidia-powerd on AlmaLinux when using newer nvidia GPUs that are not yet officially supported by the nvidia-powerd service — specifically, your GPU’s PCI device ID (0x2705) is not recognized.

Try this:

sudo systemctl disable nvidia-powerd --now
watch -n 1 nvidia-smi --query-gpu=power.draw --format=csv

All the best! :v:

5

Thanks for the insights @redadmin
@Fekthis :slight_smile:

It was indeed a non issue. Everything works great. Best nvidia + linux experience ever!

1 Like
6

@saurabhrawat

Thank you very much.
Please feel free to ask any questions you may have.