NVIDIA Power Manager

Indicator applet for laptop users with NVIDIA/Intel hybrid GPUs, allowing one to manually turn the discrete GPU on or off when needed.

It should work on any Linux distribution that includes the minimum dependencies listed in the Prerequisites section.

This version uses bbswitch to power the NVIDIA GPU off. It doesn't use prime-select or any other utilities so the primary idea of this applet is to make it possible to manually turn discrete GPU ON or OFF. It assumes specific setup when discrete GPU is only used for things like GPGPU and X server runs on integrated GPU.

This implementation is based on the NVIDIA Power Indicator applet by André Brait Carneiro Fabotti with the following changes:

• Organized as a python3 package and can be installed using pip.
• Indicator icon displays only nVidia icon either color or symbolic - corresponds to enabled / disabled GPU.
• Indicator menu simplified and doesn't have option to turn management off.
• Using py3nvml module to query list of processes that use GPU (instead of invoking pgrep)
• Message box displaying information about GPU in use displays list of processes that use GPU.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have installed and enabled:

• NVIDIA driver, version 331.20 or higher
• mesa-utils package
• python3 package
• gir1.2-appindicator3 package
• bbswitch-dkms or equivalent package

Or simply run the following, which will install all dependencies and the latest NVIDIA driver for your GPU (if it's supported by NVIDIA's latest drivers).

sudo apt-get install python3 mesa-utils bbswitch-dkms gir1.2-appindicator3
sudo apt-get install $(sudo ubuntu-drivers devices | grep -o nvidia-[[:digit:]]*)

Installation

There are two main ways to install this package: using pip or from Ubuntu PPA.

The first way is more pythonic but may fail to setup package properly. The package needs to install a file in sudoers.d and also XDG autostart file. Both are inside of /etc directory.
Depending on the environment and pip version installation to /etc may silently fail in install those files to for example /usr/local/lib/etc. This will result in application not starting with graphical session and also failing to switch GPU state if started manually.

The second way installs application as a .deb package. The downside is that application depends on py3nvml python package and that package is not available in Ubuntu repositories. So the PPA archive includes python3-py3nvml package made from the published PyPI version.

Install from PPA

Add PPA and update list of available packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dm0/nvidia-power-manager
sudo apt-get update

Install

sudo apt-get install nvidia-power-manager

Install using pip

Use pip to install package. This package installs XDG autostart file and sudoers.d file so pip install must be invoked with sudo.

sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/dm0/nvidia-power-manager#egg=nvidia-power-manager

Applet will start on next reboot. Use the following command to start in current session:

nvidia-power-manager & disown

Troubleshooting

appindicator module missing

Install the gir1.2-appindicator3 package.

Couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig

Install the mesa-utils package.

Installing from root session

Installing from root session in Ubuntu doesn't work. Use sudo to install package.

Application doesn't auto start when installed with pip

Use pip3 show -f nvidia-power-manager to view installed files.
There should be files installed to /etc.

For example (not that path are shown relative to "Location"):

$ pip3 show -f nvidia-power-manager
Name: nvidia-power-manager
...
Location: /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages
Requires: py3nvml
Required-by: 
Files:
  ../../../../../etc/sudoers.d/99-nvidia-power-manager-sudoers
  ../../../../../etc/xdg/autostart/nvidia-power-manager.desktop
  ../../../../lib/nvidia-power-manager/gpuswitcher
  ../../../bin/nvidia-power-manager
  ../../../share/icons/nvidia-power-manager-active.svg
...

If files are installed to a wrong location you man fix it manually or install package from PPA.