CachyOS / CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings
nvidia-powerd causes erroneous 750W power readings and 100% fan speed on Lenovo Legion 5 (82JU)
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Description
On Lenovo Legion 5 laptops (specifically model 82JU with AMD CPU and NVIDIA RTX 3070 Mobile), the nvidia-powerd.service causes a critical communication error with the GPU sensors. This results in the GPU reporting an impossible power draw of ~752W and getting stuck in the P0 performance state, even when idle. Consequently, the system's thermal management triggers maximum fan speeds (100%) indefinitely.
System Information:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU
- Driver Version: 590.48.01 (also observed on older 5xx versions)
- Kernel: linux-cachyos (latest)
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot into CachyOS with nvidia-powerd.service enabled.
2. Observe nvidia-smi output or fan behavior after a short period.
3. Check power draw via nvidia-smi --query-gpu=pstate,power.draw --format=csv.
Observed Behavior:
- nvidia-smi reports: P0, 752.67 W
- Fans spin up to 100% and stay there.
- journalctl shows errors from nvidia-powerd:
- ERROR! DC power limits table is not supported
- ERROR! Failed to get SysPwrLimitGetInfo!!
Expected Behavior:
The GPU should idle at ~10-15W in P8 state, and fans should remain quiet during low load.
Suggested Fix/Workaround:
Disabling and masking nvidia-powerd.service resolves the issue immediately (after a reboot or driver reload). Since this service (Dynamic Boost 2.0) is known to be broken on several Legion/AMD-based laptop configurations under Linux, it might be beneficial to provide a udev rule or a default setting in CachyOS-Settings to disable it for affected models.
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