Document GPU power saving affecting kitty startup

This commit is contained in:
Fredrick Brennan 2021-11-28 07:57:27 -05:00
parent a3370a1d18
commit afbaa36fd3

View File

@ -383,3 +383,25 @@ remaining used memory can be investigated using valgrind again, and it will
come from arenas in the GPU drivers and the per thread arenas glibc's malloc
maintains. These too allocate memory in large blocks and dont release it back
to the OS immediately.
Why is kitty slow to start?
___________________________
|kitty| takes no longer to start than other similar GPU terminal emulators, (and
may be faster than some). If |kitty| takes a long time to start, it could be a
power managment issue of your graphics card. On a multi-GPU system (which many
modern laptops are, having a power efficient GPU that's built into the
processor and a power hungry dedicated one that's usually off), even if the
answer of the GPU will only be "don't use me", the GPU still needs to be woken
up to ask it. You can keep your GPU always on by looking for it in lspci::
# lspci | grep NVIDIA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106M [GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 228e (rev a1)
Then telling it to always be on::
# echo on > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000':01:00.0'/power/control
On `at least one system<https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/4292>`_,
this saved ≈2 seconds of |kitty| instance start time.