RadeonTop: A New Utility For Open AMD Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonTop: A New Utility For Open AMD Users

A frequent Phoronix Forums contributor has created RadeonTop, a new utility for users of the open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver...

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

[Detructor]

that is...awesome!

[curaga]

Thanks for the plug Michael

One correction:

RadeonTop allows for monitoring of undocumented performance counters on Radeon graphics hardware from the R600 series and newer.

The register is documented, the docs merely conflict each other

[oliver]

Is this technically possible on r300 based hardware too? Since all r300 based hardware pretty much uses the open driver, this would be really nice to have there. r600 based users may still be using the blob for a while?

[AJenbo]

Hmm would this be helpfull in trying to optimize the driver?

[curaga]

The register this app queries did not exist until in r600.

There are some more limited ones in earlier series, whether they're useful enough I don't know. I don't have much cards from r300-r500 anyway (one r500 in a laptop).

[schmidtbag]

this is great I was looking for something just like this, however, is there any way to get that data as a single output? I'd like to use the data from it for a graphical tool I have. Also, does anybody know how to get VRAM usage?

[curaga]

There is a GL extension ATI_memory or something, which is unsupported by mesa

As for the dumping, Michael requested that too. How would you like the interface?

[schmidtbag]

There is a GL extension ATI_memory or something, which is unsupported by mesa

As for the dumping, Michael requested that too. How would you like the interface?

how would I get the ATI_memory information from a CLI? I personally would prefer the interface to work much like how the nvidia-smi or the aticonfig outputs, where you enter the command and it outputs the results once as plain text. That way it's easy to implement into other programs.

[curaga]

how would I get the ATI_memory information from a CLI?

You'd write an app that calls the GL extension. But it would currently only work on fglrx.

where you enter the command and it outputs the results once as plain text.

I mainly mean the text file behavior:

- output one line once, containing the percentages about the last second (= one sec delay as data is gathered)
- output one line once, containing a 1 for each unit that is busy at that moment

If you want the second, the execution overhead becomes big (~17ms), so you can't have really accurate results - getting say 1000 ticks per sec becomes impossible.

Alternatively, it could output either of those until terminated. Percentages once per second, or direct values once per tick. Optionally with a timeout or a max number of lines.