Radeon DRM Power Management Moves Along

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon DRM Power Management Moves Along

Over the past month or so there has been a lot of work done by RafaÅ? MiÅ?ecki and other open-source driver developers in providing open-source power management support under the ATI Radeon DRM code-base. In fact, the power management support has been the hold-up for moving the Radeon kernel mode-setting support out of the staging area of the Linux kernel, which is expected to still happen with the Linux 2.6.33 kernel. Over the past few days things have heated up even more with Rafal pushing out several new versions of his power management patches, which compared to earlier revisions from weeks ago is now leveraging the R600/700 IRQ support...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzgxMw

[leidola]

Nice. So all, which is missing for me now is the latest stuff (5??0-Support, Power management) in the distributions...

I hope this will be the case in Q2 2010 (maybe for arch) or Q3 (for the others which release then).

One question bothers me: Is this power management as good as fglrx's? Or maybe better?

[Zajec]

One question bothers me: Is this power management as good as fglrx's? Or maybe better?

It's currently very poor. It only downclocks your engine by 50MHz, nothing more. The patch means to introduce whole power management design like all decisions, mutexes, reclocking in right moment (VBLANK), etc.

Once we get that patch commited I can focus on calculating real low clocks (and just using that values instead of X-50MHz). That will be quite easy, just porting stuff from radeonhd (great work from them).

Lacking part is calculation on minimum clocks for current mode (to make sure we won't get memory too slow to display current mode). Glisse had some code for this, but nothing released unfortunately.

[Pfanne]

Glisse had some code for this, but nothing released unfortunately.

is it still in the ip review?
aside from that im really thrilled about how the development is going.
the next year is going to rock gpu support-wise.
im really happy i bought a notebook with an ati gpu ^^

[bridgman]

is it still in the ip review?

I don't think so but will check.

[Louise]

aside from that im really thrilled about how the development is going.
the next year is going to rock gpu support-wise.
im really happy i bought a notebook with an ati gpu ^^

Yeah, me too.

All the cool stuff that have wend in to .33 was really unexpected.

It is fun to think about. A few years ago Gnome and KDE was the reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest distribution.

Now Gnome and KDE are so feature rich, they new releases are not the driving factor anymore.

Now you upgrade because you want the latest kernel, because you will get tons of new features and even improved.

[uzi18]

Zajec maybe some test on rv770 needed?
If so contact me on jid.

[Zajec]

Zajec maybe some test on rv770 needed?
If so contact me on jid.

It would be great to see more testers I'll ping you, just let me prepare new version of patch.

[uzi18]

Works for me
RV770

[Zajec]

Just to note it here: patches are available on http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/pm/

Great uzi