nvidia-power-tray
A tray indicator showing the PCI power state of the NVIDIA GPU — D0 when the
card is awake, D3cold when the driver has runtime-suspended it. Useful on
hybrid-graphics laptops to see at a glance whether something is holding the
discrete GPU on.
The state is read from /sys/bus/pci/devices/<address>/power_state. That is a
plain sysfs read and does not wake a suspended card — unlike nvidia-smi or
lspci, both of which touch the device and pull it back into D0. For the
same reason the device name in the menu is resolved from /usr/share/misc/pci.ids
instead of by shelling out to lspci.
Contents
.local/bin/nvidia-power-tray # the indicator
.config/systemd/user/nvidia-power-tray.service # runs it in the GNOME session
Dependencies
- GNOME with the AppIndicator support extension
(
[email protected]) — GNOME Shell has no tray of its own gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1,gir1.2-gtk-3.0,python3-gipciutilsfor/usr/share/misc/pci.ids(already present on Debian)
sudo apt install gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 python3-gi
The script also accepts the older AppIndicator3 namespace if that is what the
system ships.
Install
cd ~/dotfiles
stow nvidia-power-tray
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now nvidia-power-tray.service
The unit is WantedBy=graphical-session.target, so it starts with the GNOME
session and stops with it.
Usage
The icon reflects the state (power-profile-performance-symbolic for D0,
power-profile-power-saver-symbolic for D3hot/D3cold) and the label next to
it is the raw state string. The menu shows the device, PCI address, bound
driver, power state, runtime-PM status and runtime-PM control setting, plus
Refresh now and Quit.
The PCI address is autodetected: the first NVIDIA (vendor 0x10de) display
controller, preferring one with a driver bound. Override it, or the 5 second
poll interval, with flags or environment variables:
nvidia-power-tray --address 0000:01:00.0 --interval 10
NVIDIA_POWER_TRAY_ADDRESS=0000:01:00.0 NVIDIA_POWER_TRAY_INTERVAL=10 nvidia-power-tray
nvidia-power-tray --print prints <address> <state> once and exits without
touching GTK — handy for testing or for a shell prompt/status bar.
Troubleshooting
systemctl --user status nvidia-power-tray.service
journalctl --user -u nvidia-power-tray.service -f
If the service runs but no icon appears, the AppIndicator extension is probably
disabled: gnome-extensions list --enabled | grep appindicator.