Description of the problem from an attempted fix at GitHub - adnanpri/legion-wmi: A WMI driver for Lenovo Legion series of laptops
Problem
The Legion line of laptops from Lenovo come with the ability to switch power modes between “quiet”, “balanced” and “performance.” On Windows this feature works as expected and you can clearly see the performance differences across benchmarks. On Linux too this seems to work out of the box, with the exception of the Nvidia GPU. No matter what is attempted, the GPU power limit is set to 80W and it never draws more than 80W, leading to significant performance limitations as compared to Windows.
Sample output of nvidia-smi on “performance” mode during benchmarks:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 495.29.05 Driver Version: 495.29.05 CUDA Version: 11.5 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce ... Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| N/A 60C P3 80W / N/A | 1716MiB / 5946MiB | 98% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
This has been confirmed a Legion 5 15ACH6H with an AMD CPU (5800H) Nvidia laptop GPU (RTX 3060) and is likely the case on all Legion models equipped with Nvidia GPUs. On Windows the max power draw on the 3 modes appear to be 80W, 95W and 130W respectively.
This driver is an attempt to set the performance mode through the the Windows Management Instrumentation made available by the BIOS (+ an ACPI call to an NVIDIA controller), with the expectation that this call replicates the behavior found on Windows.
However making the same WMI call as the one made with the bundled Lenovo Vantage software on Windows does not seem to remedy the situation. NOTE: THIS DRIVER DOES NOT WORK, AND WE NEED MORE EYES ON THIS PROBLEM.
Systems/Environments tried
Kernels: 5.10.x 5.13.x 5.14.x
Distros: Pop!_OS 21.04 Ubuntu 20.04 Garuda (Arch)
Nvidia Drivers: 460.x 470.63.x 470.74.x 495.29.x
All combinations have been attempted on both Hybrid and Discrete graphics modes.
Underlying issues
The WMI call made to appears to hand over responsiblity of adjusting the TGP of the GPU with a Notify (NPCF, 0xC0) call (found on ACPI table DSDT). \_SB_.NPCF.NPCF is a method defined in SSDT16.
NPCF seems to refer to Nvidia Platform Controller and Framework, and it appears there are no drivers to handle the device NVDA0820 found in \_SB_.NPCF . It’s most likely the case that the event triggered by the WMI call is handled by the driver on Windows and which subsequently takes care of the dynamic power limit adjustments. On Windows the device driver responsible for interfacing with the NVDA0820 device seems to be nvpcf.sys that comes with the Nvidia Drivers.
From this, it’s likely the case that the Nvidia drivers either do not recognize NPCF at all on Linux, or its support is limited.
The ACPI call to \_SB_.NPCF.NPCF found in this driver does nothing to change the power limits and the implementation on Windows is likely very different.
Other methods tried
sudo nvidia-smi -i 0 -pl 100 doesn’t work on this hardware.
Changing power management limit is not supported for GPU: 00000000:01:00.0.
Treating as warning and moving on.
All done.