Can't enable fan speeds in thermal settings with 570.86.16

[mcodax]

This seems very similar to an issue encountered 2 years ago (possibly related to: #94), but clicking "Enable GPU Fan Settings" doesn't stick and the fan speed sliders remain greyed out. Speeds are set to 0 rpm by default.

Dowgrading to 565.57.01 fixes the issue.

It's affecting two different PCs, but both of them have the same setup:

arch kernel: 6.13.2-arch1-1
nvidia: 570.86.16-5
nvidia-utils: 570.86.16-2
card: RTX 4070 Ti

[TsunamiMommy]

I can confirm that this is a permissions issue with the 570.86.15 and 570.86.16 drivers. You can enable/change fan settings only after opening the nvidia-settings app with root privileges. So currently any fan control must be done as root. Is this something that is intentional from Nvidia? Or is this a mistake in the permissions of the app?

[mcodax]

Thanks @TsunamiMommy. Can also confirm setting fan speeds with root works for me.

Also, just tested the newly released version (570.124.04) and it's still broken.

[TsunamiMommy]

Yup the issue extends to nvidia-smi too so it's likely something having to do with hardware access permissions.

[mcodax]

Just for reference in case it helps, this is the message I see when I try to change fan speeds after launching nvidia-settings from the console:

ERROR: The current user does not have permission for operation

Current versions:

nvidia-settings: 570.144-1
nvidia: 570.144-4
nvidia-utils: 570.144-3

[CummingCowGirl]

Just launched nVidia-Settings as root and set the fans to 80% to keep the GPU below 40 degrees and on reboot it resets. I opened the one file edited thermal and put 80 instead of 0 and again on reboot the fans were at 0. Now I can't check the box and set them to 80 even though the file looks to be back to what it was before I changed it.

Arch - update as of this morning
NVIDIA Corporation - GA106 [GeForce RTX 3060 Lite Hash Rate]

nvidia-settings: 570.153.02
nvidia: 570.153.02
nvidia-utils: 570.153.02

[mcodax]

This may help explain what we're seeing (from the 570.86.16 driver release in late Jan: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/240524/):

Updated the nvidia-settings control panel to use NVML rather than NV-CONTROL to control GPU clocks and fan speed. This allows related functionality to work when using Wayland, where the NV-CONTROL X extension is not available. Note that as a result, some operations which were previously available to unprivileged users, due to the privileges of the X server, may now require elevated privileges.

Ironically, changing from x11 to wayland doesn't fix the issue anyway (my earlier report was based on x11)