Caelestia keeps polling my external NVIDIA GPU even though it’s disabled

[OverclockedSenku]

Hi,

I’m on Arch Linux. Previously I was using GNOME without issues, but after some recent crashes I decided to try Caelestia. The setup works, but I’ve run into a problem related to GPU usage.

I have two GPUs:

• AMD Radeon 9000 (my main/internal GPU)
• NVIDIA RTX 6000 (external, very power-hungry)

Since I don’t want the NVIDIA card to be used at all, I’ve taken the following steps:

• Blacklisted all NVIDIA drivers via modprobe
• Avoided installing proprietary or Nouveau drivers
• Added udev rules to remove/disable the NVIDIA card from the system

This works fine in GNOME and other environments—the NVIDIA GPU stays fully powered down.

However, when I boot into Caelestia, the system seems to ping the NVIDIA GPU every few seconds (the GPU indicator light flickers). This prevents it from staying in a low-power state, which wastes power and generates unnecessary heat.

Question:
Is there a way to configure Caelestia so that it only queries/uses my AMD GPU and completely ignores the NVIDIA one? Ideally, I’d like Caelestia to never touch or probe the external GPU at all.

Thanks in advance!

[soramanew]

The shell should auto detect which gpu to poll via this command

if command -v nvidia-smi &>/dev/null && nvidia-smi -L &>/dev/null; then echo NVIDIA; elif ls /sys/class/drm/card*/device/gpu_busy_percent 2>/dev/null | grep -q .; then echo GENERIC; else echo NONE; fi

For cases when it doesn't detect properly, I've added a manual config option with 842249e. The available options are empty for auto detection (default), "nvidia" for nvidia and "generic" for generic (should work for AMD/Intel)

[soramanew]

Hmm, that's weird. In that case, it's probably not related to the shell. Have you checked whether any other applications/services are using the GPU?

[OverclockedSenku]

It may be the hyprland or quickshell.. because non of the applications seems be using that since I disable the nvidia and removed config from xorg and wayland.

[soramanew]

If you kill the shell does the GPU still get polled? (e.g. run qs -c caelestia kill and check if the gpu is still being polled)

[OverclockedSenku]

Okay, I'll try this.
Sorry for this much late reply, I was stuck on my company's work and etc. I didn't even used my laptop till now. I'll setup it again clean. Because I have went from Gnome -> KDE -> Calestia, so the system itself is now very bloated from the packages, I'll clean install and try it again.
Thank you in advance for helping me.

[OverclockedSenku]

If you kill the shell does the GPU still get polled? (e.g. run qs -c caelestia kill and check if the gpu is still being polled)

I have tried it and the conclusion is:
When the caelestia is Running then the GPU Light Flickers.
When Killed GPU Light is stable (Not Flickering)

I also tried setting gpu card into hyprland.conf file (Via official docs) but still it is being active and sucking Power.