TTM, Radeon KMS Support Goes Into Linux 2.6.31

[nanonyme]

Albeit it's a great news (I mean really great, pwned Nvidia lovers ). Will one day the radeonhd and the radeon drivers merged ? I guess that the work would have progressed faster if all the devs worked on the same code...

Not really. When you talk of radeon and radeonhd drivers you are talking of one *small* part of the puzzle. All work on libdrm, DRM kernel modules and Mesa gets shared. Optimizing away the radeon/radeonhd and combining them would be unlikely to give any extra resources for developing those other bigger parts of the puzzle. After all, much of the differences in the drivers (like modesetting stuff, HDMI audio, TV out and so) seems to be ending in the kernel in a unified solution anyway.

[nanonyme]

So can anyone tell me, how I force it to the lowest possible power state, so I can unplug the fan?

Might be dangerous and burn the card even with maximum powersaving options on. I'd recommend using closed drivers and waiting until open drivers get fan control capabilities if noise is an issue.

[Louise]

Hi Louise;

As far as I know the power state code has not yet been ported into the kernel, although it probably is high on the list after stability issues.

Hi

So I can't just pull xf86-video-ati master, and then use ForceLowPowerMode and DynamicPM with 2.6.31?

[MùPùF]

It works !!!

Finally, here it is ! I just followed Dave's tutorial and it almost worked immediately.
Just had to revert this : http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kerne...4c40ac16148ec0
If you Xorg log complains about SAREA something, just revert this commit.

Ok, on the down side now, I'd complain about performances and drm flooding both my Xorg.log and kernel logs.
Xorg.log :
RADEON DRM CS failure - corruptions/glitches may occur -22
bufmgr: last submission : r:0 vs g:33554432 w:0 vs v:108697185

dmesg:
[drm:r300_cs_track_check] *ERROR* [drm] No buffer for color buffer 1 !
[drm:radeon_cs_ioctl] *ERROR* Invalid command stream !

Also, there is some mini tearing on the screen everywhere, may it be moving or not. It is not really beautiful and is also a bit annoying as texts are kind of flickering. Also, there is a backdrop problem when running compiz, for instance, with glxgears, I first see the wheels and half a second later, the black backdrop comes. The problem is the same with every window.
I won't use KMS/DRI2 now, this is not ready and I understand the choice to put KMS in the stagging branch. I'll try to follow this as it improves.

Well done everyone !

[Louise]

Might be dangerous and burn the card even with maximum powersaving options on. I'd recommend using closed drivers and waiting until open drivers get fan control capabilities if noise is an issue.

My primary GPU is the onboard 780G (3200 HD), and the R500 PCI-E card is just a card I bought very cheap so I just play with the open source 3D.

So I "just" the card dies, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but if it catches fire, or damages the mainboard, I might look at it differently

[DeepDayze]

Thanks, Yoshi. I followed the link. I still don't fully dig it. If this is residing in the kernel, how is it different from other drivers/components? To be specific, if someone want to access the new KMS or TTM in user space, can they just do it? If so, how is this different from being a proper driver/kernel component?

Many thanks!

Think you will need to enable the development/experimental driver config option when configuring the kernel.

[yoshi314]

Think you will need to enable the development/experimental driver config option when configuring the kernel.

yes, this is pretty much successor to the experimental drivers, that were available in the kernels some releases ago. experimental however, didn't really work out - quite a lot of features were left in experimental for too long and its meaning diminished over time.

user accepting to use staging drivers must be prepared for missing features, crashes and random operation.

staging is sort of a testbed for new drivers, and new technologies inside the kernel. it can also contain the code that does not yet meet kernel quality standards (e.g. in case of drm/ttm pull there are reports of possible security holes in the current code).

if somebody wants to take them for a spin, they just need to change few variables in kernel config and rebuild it. this removes the need to throw multiple patches from different sources against the kernel just take some new drivers for a spin.