Xinze Zhang

Controlling NVIDIA GPU Fans and Clock remotely

 
  • Sep 01, 2021

Acknowledgment

This article is based on the post Controlling NVIDIA GPU Fans on a headless Ubuntu system by James Conner.

nvidia-xconfig

First: enable the cool-bits

$ sudo nvidia-xconfig -a --cool-bits=28

Second: edit the xorg file

$ sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down till you find Section “Screen”

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "Coolbits" "28"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Check the /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config file, if not existing, then create it by sudo nano /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config. Make sure the following contents in the Xwrapper.config, if not, add them.

needs_root_rights=yes
allowed_users=console

Third: reboot

nvidia-settings

To control the fan speed or overclock the nvidia gpu on ubuntu 20.04 remotely via ssh, we need utilizes the nvidia-settings command with the xauth credentials of the Gnome Desktop Manager account.

First: get the user id for the gdm desktop

$ id gdm

uid=110(gdm) gid=116(gdm) groups=116(gdm)

Second: verify the gdm user has an Authority file

$ sudo ls -AFlh /run/user/110/gdm/

total 4.0K
-rwx------ 1 gdm gdm 108 Sep  7 20:48 Xauthority*

Third: create the script oc.sh to control the gpu clock and the fan speed. And the context can be as follows:

for i in "$@"; do
    sudo DISPLAY=:0 XAUTHORITY=/run/user/110/gdm/Xauthority nvidia-settings \
    -a "[gpu:$i]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[4]=-400" \
    -a "[gpu:$i]/GPUMemoryTransferRateOffset[4]=3200" \
    -a "[gpu:$i]/GPUFanControlState=1" \
    -a "[fan:$i]/GPUTargetFanSpeed=85" 
done

Fourth: execute the script.

$ sh oc.sh 0 1 2

BTW: to revert the fan setting, execute the command in the following manner

$ sudo DISPLAY=:0 XAUTHORITY=/run/user/110/gdm/Xauthority nvidia-settings -a '[gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=0'

Sometimes, you need to restart gdm service to execute the above mentioned commands.

sudo systemctl restart gdm
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