Adding “nvidia_drm modeset=1” to /etc/default/grub causes the “Enable GPU Fan Settings” check box in nvidia-settings to immediately un-check itself. Changing this to “nvidia_drm modeset=0” and rebooting allows the box to stay checked.
This stems from an “ERROR: The current user does not have permission for operation” message printed by nvidia-settings, but only when “nvidia_drm modeset=1”.
I have experienced this issue on Debian 12 and Fedora 39. It happens with drivers from the direct-from-NVIDIA CUDA toolkit repos and the distros’ provided drivers from non-free and RPMfusion.
There are multiple threads on this forum and others, so perhaps this is intended behavior?
FWIW this thread has a solution on how to fix this, but it requires running Xorg as root.
Confirmed. I’m able to enable “GPU Fan Settings” only when I run sudo nvidia-settings in Wayland.
Now I’m getting this fan information (even when a run nvidia-settings as a normal user)
.
Not sure it’s normal that e.g. I can’t change fan speed nor can’t see RPM speed, but it might be a limitation of my card (MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC) … ?
Tested in Ubuntu 24.04, with nvidia driver 560.35.03.
I can understand preventing non-root users from controlling fans, e.g. to prevent hardware damage by untrusted users.
But it seems that, if the current behavior of nvidia-settings is intentional, nvidia_drm modeset=0 should not give non-root users fan control privileges.
nvidia_drm modeset is not automatically appended to /etc/default/grub on Debian. But it is on Fedora. So in the default configuration after driver install, non-root Debian users have fan control but non-root Fedora users do not.
Also, for single-user workstations like my own, this is obnoxious. The default fan curve of my RTX A5000 is nowhere near aggressive enough to keep the card cool under prolonged compute loads. So fan control is a must.
