Disable discrete GPUs on AGX E3550

Autonomous Vehicles DRIVE AGX Xavier DRIVE AGX Xavier General
1

I have a system with two discrete GPUs and I would like to disable them from running at startup. How do I achieve this?

2

Hi animeshramesh,

From hardware system point of view, that’s doable, but there is no relevant SW to support it yet, and we’re discussing internally, may I know how you want to utilize the system? Any specific use case?

3

We would like to disable the discrete GPUs to minimize the power consumption in our system. We believe that disabling them would prevent any leakage current in the dGPUs when they are not in use.

4

So this requirement is to runtime disable/enable the discrete GPUs, right?

5

Yes. It could either be configured at runtime or during system startup.

6

Dear animeshramesh,

Sorry for late reply.

Please update DRIVE Software from 9.0 to 10 first.
And then run the following command to disable dGPU.

sudo systemctl disable nv_fanctrl
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
sudo reboot

Then to turn everything back on after the rmmod/insmod

sudo systemctl enable nv_fanctrl
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
sudo reboot
7

Hi animeshramesh,

DRIVE Software 10.0 is now available to download - https://developer.nvidia.com/drive/downloads