linux-surface
Surface Book 2 dGPU stuck at P8 on battery
Apologies if I am missing something in this issue, I am not used to reporting bugs in public projects. I have been having an issue with my Surface Book 2 13" for months where if I am on battery, the GTX 1050 will be stuck in the P8 performance mode and stuck at the lowest clock possible on battery. nvidia-smi reports the card as thermal throttling due to 'SW Thermal Slowdown' at 38 degrees while the thermal slowdown threshold is reported to be 97 degrees. I have tried downgrading my Nvidia drivers down to 515 from latest, using DKMS. I am using Arch Linux with the linux-surface kernel and Wayland with Sway and this issue is not present on Windows and the issue is only on battery, the GPU works fine when plugged in. I apologise for the lack of information, I am not at my laptop at the moment and will not be for a few hours.
After attempting to get more information on this issue, I found a mention of it at the Arch wiki right here, and I can confirm that nvidia-smi does not seem to be able to see the fan for the GPU however I am unsure how to debug this further.
I have attached the dmesg output in a txt file, and the output of nvidia-smi -q while running __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA-only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia glxgears
on battery and plugged into power in seperate files.
nvidia-smi-plugged.txt
nvidia-smi-battery.txt
dmesg.txt
I have also tested this in x11 with i3wm, and confirmed that the behavior does persist even when not using Wayland.
Can confirm for Surface Laptop Studio.
My output and device info:
`❯ prime-run glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA RTX A2000 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2
~ ❯ uname -r 6.15.3-arch1-2-surface
~ ❯ upower
~
❯ nvidia-smi
Thu Jul 31 16:07:00 2025
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.261.03 Driver Version: 535.261.03 CUDA Version: 12.2 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| 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 RTX A2000 Laptop GPU Off | 00000000:F3:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 48C P8 8W / 10W | 803MiB / 4096MiB | 100% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Processes: | | GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory | | ID ID Usage | |=======================================================================================| | 0 N/A N/A 3776 C+G ...mapps/common/Valheim/valheim.x86_64 795MiB | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
~ ❯ nvidia-smi -q | grep "Power Source"
~ ❯ sudo nvidia-smi -q -d PERFORMANCE
[sudo] Passwort für xx:
==============NVSMI LOG==============
Timestamp : Thu Jul 31 16:07:52 2025 Driver Version : 535.261.03 CUDA Version : 12.2
Attached GPUs : 1 GPU 00000000:F3:00.0 Performance State : P8 Clocks Event Reasons Idle : Not Active Applications Clocks Setting : Not Active SW Power Cap : Active HW Slowdown : Not Active HW Thermal Slowdown : Not Active HW Power Brake Slowdown : Not Active Sync Boost : Not Active SW Thermal Slowdown : Active Display Clock Setting : Not Active Sparse Operation Mode : N/A `
Same with new driver (575xx). Meaning:
- Nvidia does not detect AC connected
- thus stays in P8 state
- thus throttles to max. 10W -> low fps in games (tested Valheim).
Any fix possible?
I'm having the same issue, this is my only inhibitor for running Linux as my main OS. I'm using a Surface Laptop Studio 2.
Running Fedora.
