The Dynamic Boost feature is unreliable #966
Description
NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules Version
nvidia-open-dkms 580.105.08
Please confirm this issue does not happen with the proprietary driver (of the same version). This issue tracker is only for bugs specific to the open kernel driver.
- I confirm that this does not happen with the proprietary driver package.
Operating System and Version
Arch
Kernel Release
6.17.7-arch1-1.1-g14 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:13:39 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Please confirm you are running a stable release kernel (e.g. not a -rc). We do not accept bug reports for unreleased kernels.
- I am running on a stable kernel release.
Hardware: GPU
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU
Describe the bug
The bug boils down to the fact that if Dynamic Boost DC should be enabled or not is checked when nvidia-powerd is started.
Basically all recent ASUS laptops have the ability to change that at runtime, so this bug has two sides to it:
When the feature is disabled at ACPI level starting the application gives us:
"ERROR! Client (presumably SBIOS) has requested to disable Dynamic Boost DC controller"
and the feature is unavailable until the daemon is restarted.
When the feature is enabled at ACPI level and later disabled the new setting doesn't apply correctly immediately and there are power management issues following that event.
The correct solution would be to perform that check when the specific ACPI property changes, not just at startup and avoid erroring at startup when it is not available right away.
To Reproduce
- Start nvidia-powerd with the feature disabled at ACPI level
- Error occurs
- Enable feature at ACPI level
- Disable it later
- nvidia-powerd service is not aware of the change, resulting in power management issues.
Bug Incidence
Always
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz
More Info
No response