Resolve 15 beta + laptop battery = CRASH

Hi! I'm having a very strange problem, and I'm out of ideas. When DaVinci Resolve 15 beta is running on my Linux laptop plugged into the wall, everything is fine. But when it's running on battery power, it kills the entire laptop within minutes. Instant shutdown. Every time.

Does anyone have any ideas about why this could be happening or how to solve it?

Things I've tried:
* updating from beta 5 to beta 7
* updating the OS (duh)
* updating the laptop firmware
* limiting Resolve to CUDA only
* limiting Resolve to OpenCL only
* limiting Fusion to CPU only

Details:
* Resolve 15 beta 5 and 7 -- same behavior on both
* Pop!_OS (aka Ubuntu 18.04) via MakeResolveDeb
* The crash looks like an instantaneous shutdown; one second you're working, the next second you're looking at a black screen.
* Each crash is preceded by a very short (~1s) CPU spike, courtesy of process "GUI Thread."

2018 System76 Oryx Pro
* 8 GB GTX 1070 with 2048 CUDA Cores
* 15.6″ Matte HiDPI 4K HiDPI Display
* 4.1 GHz i7-8750H (9MB Cache – 6 Cores – 12 Threads)
* 32 GB Dual-channel DDR4 at 2400 MHz (2× 16 GB)
* 250 GB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD
* 250 GB 2.5″ SSD

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

JMT

You've got a 55wh battery. Odds are it's just dying that fast. If not, then it's overheating.

That's kind of what you get when you put a tablet battery in a laptop with desktop replacement specs.

My laptop has an older i7 and an older ati card, it's got a 120 watt power supply and a 97 watt hour battery. Without heavy load I maybe get 2 hours off the battery, put some load on it and the battery does die quite quickly.

My guess with that hardware and that battery, you couldn't run windows or even a standard linux distro. Be very careful with that thing, LIPO fires are hard to put out.

it may be that the the small battery just cannot deliver a enough amps at a critical load. (I have somne batteries that when my Atomos Inferno says are flat because they cant supply enough current - will run my sony camera for another hour.)

also - is there a discrete GPU at all? When we got our new laptops DR ran fine on power - but crashed if on battery. Laptops were switching to the discrete GPU to save power. Not sure if that would be an issue under Linux but just looking at ideas to help

J

Jeff and Jeremy, thanks for your suggestions.

You've got a 55wh battery. Odds are it's just dying that fast. If not, then it's overheating.

The battery is definitely not dying, but overheating might be it. I discounted overheating before b/c it will crash on battery after two minutes -- even if it's not doing anything -- but I can edit for hours plugged in without a problem. The only reason I think it might be the cause now is that it exhibited the same behavior a couple days ago, but for the first time it was a) plugged in and b) not running DR. I think in that case it may have been having trouble getting air in to vent, overheated and went into BIOS shutdown.

So the only thing I can think of is that maybe it gets hotter on the train b/c it's on my lap, and also maybe it runs hotter when it's on battery power for some reason? I feel like I'm grasping at straws, but I still don't have any better ideas.

also - is there a discrete GPU at all? When we got our new laptops DR ran fine on power - but crashed if on battery. Laptops were switching to the discrete GPU to save power. Not sure if that would be an issue under Linux but just looking at ideas to help

Yes, there is integrated Intel graphics, plus an NVIDIA 1070. DR won't start at all with Intel activated, so NVIDIA is the only option. I'm trying to get System76 tech support to give me details on what happens when it switches to battery or switches power modes, but they don't seem to want to lay it out for me, for some reason. It has three power modes: High Performance, Battery, and Balanced. I tried forcing it stay in High Performance (by default it's always on Balanced), and that got me the longest battery run on record so far. I'm going to try Battery mode next; I'm thinking maybe if it throttles the CPU or something that will help control the heat.

Really, though, nothing I've thought of yet actually explains all of this behavior. There's just no way it overheats in 2 minutes while idle. So I'm still just casting about looking for possibilities.

Thanks for your help!

JMT

Yes, there is integrated Intel graphics, plus an NVIDIA 1070. DR won't start at all with Intel activated, so NVIDIA is the only option.

That's probably your answer right there.

I ran into this with my HP Spectre; when running without external power, it disabled the nVidia GPU. There IS a power profile setting in Windows that allowed me to override that and make it use the nVidia GPU at the expense of significantly reducing battery life.

It's also entirely possible that your laptop's battery is simply not able to provide enough power for the nVidia GPU when it's operating under load.

Still, if you can find a power profile that enables the nVidia GPU when running on battery you can then test it... though you might end up with just 5-6 minutes of battery life.