ATI Kernel Power Management Moves A Bit More

[bridgman]

My recollection was that dynpm was turned off by default in the drm still, so you wouldn't have seen much in the way of power savings there. Not sure if the Lucid (2.6.33) drm is ready to have dynpm turned on or whether you need newer (ie this week) code for good results.

[Pfanne]

My recollection was that dynpm was turned off by default in the drm still, so you wouldn't have seen much in the way of power savings there. Not sure if the Lucid (2.6.33) drm is ready to have dynpm turned on or whether you need newer (ie this week) code for good results.

since im playing heroes of newerth quite frequently the oss drivers are unfortunately not yet a viable option for me.

[monraaf]

With Alex's brand new patch, hwmon drivers can now be loaded for the I2C thermal chips found on many ATI graphics cards. In other words, we finally have thermal monitoring and fan speed support for the open-source ATI stack!

Correct me if I'm wrong. But as I understand it I2C is only used by older cards. For the newer cards, Evergreen included, all the stuff is internal, and ATI has yet to release any documentation or code about that.

[RealNC]

Is there a way to use that with kernel 2.6.33?

[bridgman]

Correct me if I'm wrong. But as I understand it I2C is only used by older cards. For the newer cards, Evergreen included, all the stuff is internal, and ATI has yet to release any documentation or code about that.

Pretty much, although the transition seems to be fuzzier than that. Internal temp/fan logic was added midway through the 6xx generation but board partners didn't start using it immediately. AFAIK the situation is more or less :

- all pre-6xx boards use external chips
- "some" 6xx boards used on-chip controllers
- "most" 7xx and Evergreen boards use on-chip controllers

Dual-GPU boards are interesting in the sense that most of them share a cooling solution between the GPUs, so the fan speeds need to be a function of multiple temperature sensors. In those cases you again see an external fan/temp controller, with sensor diode inputs from both GPUs being combined to drive one or more fans at the same speed.

[bridgman]

We're still learning how all this stuff works, in case it's not obvious

[V!NCENT]

btw
do you guys expect the oss powermanagement to be as good as the fglrx powermanagement?

Totally impossible... with fglrx the card does nothing at all xD

[monraaf]

We're still learning how all this stuff works, in case it's not obvious

Is that the reason there is no code or docs out for that, or is it because of the bureaucrats at IP review again? And when can we expect the missing code and docs, especially regarding Evergreen?

[Pfanne]

Totally impossible... with fglrx the card does nothing at all xD

funny thing is, that i never had many problems with fglrx.

[agd5f]

Is that the reason there is no code or docs out for that, or is it because of the bureaucrats at IP review again? And when can we expect the missing code and docs, especially regarding Evergreen?

There aren't really any docs on how to program power management. All the relevant hw block specifications have bits and pieces relative to the block, but you need to tie it all together to have something useful, so you have to ask a lot of people and test a lot of things.

Note that other than the internal thermal stuff on newer r6xx+, the information for power management has been available for a while now. the atombios data tables for r5xx and below has been available for years, and the data tables for r6xx+ have been available for several months.