HCL - NovaCustom/NitroPad V54 with NVIDIA GPU

User Support HCL Reports
1 
---
layout:
  'hcl'
type:
  'Notebook'
hvm:
  'yes'
iommu:
  'yes'
slat:
  'yes'
tpm:
  '2.0'
remap:
  'yes'
brand: |
  Notebook
model: |
  V5xTNC_TND_TNE
bios: |
  Dasharo (coreboot+UEFI) v0.9.1
cpu: |
  Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H
cpu-short: |
  FIXME
chipset: |
  Intel Corporation Device [8086:7d01] (rev 04)
chipset-short: |
  FIXME
gpu: |
  Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics] [8086:7d55] (rev 08) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
  
  NVIDIA Corporation AD107M [GeForce RTX 4060 Max-Q / Mobile] [10de:28a0] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
  
gpu-short: |
  FIXME
network: |
  Intel Corporation Device [8086:7e40] (rev 20)
  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)
memory: |
  97940
scsi: |

usb: |
  3
certified:
  'no'
versions:
  - works:
      'yes'
    qubes: |
      R4.2.4
    xen: |
      4.17.5
    kernel: |
      6.15.10-1
    remark: |
      FIXME
    credit: |
      FIXAUTHOR
    link: |
      FIXLINK

Remarks

  • Everything works well
  • 96GB of RAM is great
  • I tested the GPU by creating sys-gui-gpu. GPUs work, but occasionally VM freezes and qrexec stops logging for a few minutes, maybe this is coming from the nouveau driver? I don’t know how to use NVIDIA drivers to make sys-gui-gpu. You can set a cron job to detect when qrexec is frozen in the VM and change the mouse and keyboard to dom0 to restore, but if you turn on the fan Fn+1 when the sys-gui-gpu freezes, the entire laptop freezes and needs a hard restart.
  • Relevant USB controller information

Attachments

HCL-NovaCustom-NV54-NVIDIA.yml (1017 Bytes)

3 Likes
2 
layout:
  'hcl'
type:
  'Notebook'
hvm:
  'yes'
iommu:
  'yes'
slat:
  'yes'
tpm:
  '2.0'
remap:
  'yes'
brand: |
  Notebook
model: |
  V5xTNC_TND_TNE
bios: |
  Dasharo (coreboot+UEFI) v0.9.1
cpu: |
  Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H
cpu-short: |
  FIXME
chipset: |
  Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-H 6p+8e cores Host Bridge/DRAM Controller [8086:7d01] (rev 04)
chipset-short: |
  FIXME
gpu: |
  Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics] [8086:7d55] (rev 08) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
  
  NVIDIA Corporation AD106M [GeForce RTX 4070 Max-Q / Mobile] [10de:2820] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
  
gpu-short: |
  FIXME
network: |
  Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P Gaussian & Neural-Network Accelerator [8086:7e4c] (rev 20)
  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)
  Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 7(802.11be) AX1775*/AX1790*/BE20*/BE401/BE1750* 2x2 [8086:272b] (rev 1a)
memory: |
  40596
scsi: |

usb: |
  3
certified:
  'no'
versions:
  - works:
      'FIXME:yes|no|partial'
    qubes: |
      R4.3-rc3
    xen: |
      4.19.3
    kernel: |
      6.12.54-1
    remark: |
      FIXME
    credit: |
      FIXAUTHOR
    link: |
      FIXLINK

I have the RTX 4070 variant and have some problems on Qubes 4.3-rc3.

There is a big problem with the battery charging

The battery doesn’t charge for me above 93%. So whenever I connected the laptop to the AC it charged the battery although it was basically full. This lead to extremely fast degradation of the battery capacity and the laptop got very hot.

There are a few fixes one should absolutely apply to not kill the battery within one week:

  • Change Dasharo firmware thresholds when to start and stop charging.
    • Set high charge threshold below the highest percentage Qubes charges (e.g. 93%). Better is 70% if you have it connected to AC all the time anyways.
    • See the docs how to do it: Features - Dasharo Universe
  • Suspend doesn’t seem to work? At least the fans don’t stop spinning. But the power light blinks and the laptop seems to be suspended. Waking up from suspend works fine though.

External modnitor via HDMI: Doesn’t work.

Some optimizations

  • Optimize power with powertop, especially important to not have the dGPU draw power all the time:
    • sudo qubes-dom0-update install powertop && sudo systemctl enable powertop.service
    • This optimizes all devices’ power usage. Read powertop’s docs for more details.

Heads support

Attachments

HCL-NovaCustom-NV54-NVIDIA-2.yml (1.2 KB)

2 Likes
3

Funny, because the external HDMI is working for me. It connects to the NVIDIA GPU, so you must attach the GPU to a VM and boot the VM for HDMI. Have you tried this?

3 Likes
4

No. I assumed the HDMI port has a MUX switch behind it. But your comment explains it of course.
The GPU is not assigned to a VM (didn’t try out sys-gui yet) but to dom0. So it probably ignores it then.

1 Like
5

Experimented a little with sys-gui-gpu but too much stuff is not implemented yet.
The shutdown doesn’t work yet (it shuts down sys-gui-gpu but not the laptop), the app-menus are emptied/reset. sys-gui-gpu is not set as default gui vm, i915 driver is not disabled so has to be done manually in grub.

Reverted back for now.
Installing the NVIDIA driver in dom0 works somewhat but the picture gets distorted.
It might require some xorg.conf tinkering.
So best option seems to be to just wait for sys-gui-gpu being improved.

1 Like