ellyI really can’t wait until gpu resetting on Linux will become a thing…
Many motherboards (especially reference boards from silicon vendors or laptops) allow you to enable/disable power to the slot by controlling the GPIO (SoC pincontrol).
You can spot this by looking for “rtd” in src/mainboard/* directory in coreboot tree, there are pins specified for PCIe power and reset.
Imagine being able to cut the power to something like a dedicated GPU in your system by setting PCIE_PWR pin low and decreasing your desktop power’s consumption by ~30W (or even ~80W if you happen to use first-generation Intel Arc GPU).
Then when you want to play a game, you would set the pin high, DRM would re-initialize the card, and you could either play as-is (displays connected to iGPU would cost you some performance due to DMA framebuffer copy) or press the button on (very inexpensive these days) DP/HDMI switch and play with full performance straight from dGPU.
Of course none of that would be required if board vendor would implement ASPM correctly, but vast majority of board vendors fuck up their power management/board designs, so that would be nice to have.
(One day I will go insane enough to design an open-source ATX board that would implement everything correctly and use STM32 as an Embedded Controller)
Rachel
☃️karolherbst☃️
Martin Roukala (né Peres)
FULL-FIFO DEVELOPER 🇺🇦🇨🇿