Radeon Power Management Still An Incomplete Mess

[bwat47]

This is why I've switched to intel, I refuse to use closed drivers anymore (always more trouble then they are worth, slow to be compatible with new kernel/xorg versions etc...) and the poor power management on the OSS radeon drivers makes them pretty useless for a laptop. AMD should take a hint from intel and completely support open linux drivers, instead of dropping limited documentation and hoping the community does the work for free. While I appreciate that they at least offer documentation, I just wish AMD and nvidia would open there eyes and get rid of this closed source driver nonsense.

[smitty3268]

Who can stand bridgman's bullshit anyway? I can't

His rhetoric just turn people into sick wreck's.

The people just should fix problems like bridgman:

Drop any mobile device with gnu-linux and if you need a Mobil one buy a android phone.
Use windows for any serious "work" or do it like michael larabell: use macos for any serious "work"
For Bridgman and Michael Linux is a "toy" and only strange nerds use it for serious.

Anyway any "Linux" customer of AMD hardware (and Nvidia hardware and Intel hardware) is stupid and this is a "fact" and Bridgman knows it its a simple Corporatism Economic fact the stupid Linux customers cross-platform-subsidy windows(-closed-source-drivers) with a factor of ~50

And Linux customers can only escape this "trap" if they buy "Closed-source-ARM" hardware.

So its simple... be a stupid Linux customer and buy AMD hardware or be a smart Linux customer and buy ARM hardware.

And for Bridgman the AMD customers are only victims who pay the bill of his luxury life.

Is that you again Q?

If so, I have to compliment you, you've improved your writing ability about 10-fold. It's still terrible, but no longer bat-shit-Q-level-crazy bad - good enough i can't really tell for sure if it's you, even if what your saying sounds exactly like what Q always said.

What makes me suspicious - saying 'this is a "fact"', with fact in quotes like that, is very strange and something Q did constantly. Quoting "toy" as well. And of course that strange bridgman-windows obsession he had.

[DanL]

Is that you again Q?

If so, I have to compliment you, you've improved your writing ability about 10-fold. It's still terrible, but no longer bat-shit-Q-level-crazy bad - good enough i can't really tell for sure if it's you, even if what your saying sounds exactly like what Q always said.

What makes me suspicious - saying 'this is a "fact"', with fact in quotes like that, is very strange and something Q did constantly. Quoting "toy" as well. And of course that strange bridgman-windows obsession he had.

That's along the same lines I was thinking...

[DanL]

The ATOMBIOS vs radeonhd thing in this article is bullshit from the usual phoronix shit.

You know journalists... They love "angles"

[Sidicas]

I think the fact remains that for a lot of the Radeon Mobility hardware, it's not possible to fix the power management simply because the driver doesn't know how to properly clock the graphics chips..

ATI gave the laptop manufacturers freedom to clock some of the mobility chips any way that they wanted to meet their heat/power usage capabilities of the laptop. So some laptops are designed around the idea that the graphics chip is going to be clocked a little bit lower than ATI's "stock clock" for the chip..

I use rovclock to manually clock my graphics chip down at boot, and then I clock it up and set HYPERZ whenever I run a game.. I think it's actually *BETTER* than the AMD Catalyst drivers on Windows XP simply because the AMD Catalyst drivers on Windows XP *ALWAYS* ran the GPU at full clocks when the laptop was plugged into the wall.. So whenever my laptop was plugged into the wall, it was a lot hotter than on battery, but now I have a lot more control over it than I ever had in Windows.. So I don't complain..

I've gotten my Mobility X700 all the way down to 100/150 from 350/350.. Anything less than 100/150 is unstable...

[remm]

I also switched to Intel thanks to Ivy (not great on paper to be polite, but very decent on LInux "with no proprietary kernel module" in practice). Looks like this was the right decision, ATI is really going nowhere.

[agd5f]

I use rovclock to manually clock my graphics chip down at boot, and then I clock it up and set HYPERZ whenever I run a game.. I think it's actually *BETTER* than the AMD Catalyst drivers on Windows XP simply because the AMD Catalyst drivers on Windows XP *ALWAYS* ran the GPU at full clocks when the laptop was plugged into the wall.. So whenever my laptop was plugged into the wall, it was a lot hotter than on battery, but now I have a lot more control over it than I ever had in Windows.. So I don't complain..

I've gotten my Mobility X700 all the way down to 100/150 from 350/350.. Anything less than 100/150 is unstable...

You are probably actually using lower clocks than you think. The problem with rovclock is that it doesn't take into account the post dividers on the PLLs. So unless the post divider is set to 1, you are actually programing much lower clocks than you think. Additionally, many of the vram related registers changed between 1xx and newer generations so adjusting the mclk can be problematic on newer cards. For atom based cards (r4xx and newer), I'd recommend using the atom tables to adjust the clocks manually.

[Adarion]

Oh. Well. From my personal pov:

More than a year ago my old Sapphire HD 3870 (Ultimate ed.) was doing during idle periods
about 75 W (whole computer w. 4850e CPU, HDDs, some USB, PCI cards, ... without screen) "from the wall" with (Gentoo) Linux (dunno which kernel) and fglrx.
80 W in Windows (NT 5.1 aka XP) w. Catalyst
85 W free driver stack (not sure if I had KMS at that time, otherwise same Gentoo installation).
So fglrx in Linux was best, 5 W more in Windows, and another 5W more with free drivers. Not super shiny for the free drivers and visible difference but not screaming bad.

With just the onboard HD3300 the difference was less visible (all around 45-50W or something).

I should really measure stuff today again with my HD 5670, again Sapphire. But iirc. the difference last time I tried was not so much. Same mainboard still with a mediocre DSDT and stuff (MSFT compiled).
So I think it actually got better, but to be exact I would have to find my old 3870 and compare again. (The 6xxx series was out already but I chose the 5xxx series since I knew it was better supported at that time.)

But then, I have a dedicated card, from a vendor that normally sticks close to the AMD-ATI reference design. (And with my poor user-only-knowledge) I guess a lot of problems might also come from vendors doing their own tweaks and modifications, especially on laptops. Then any default mechanisms might not get a good grip so you need a lot of quirks in the drivers.

At least here on Phoronix I rarely see anybody complain about missing OpenCL features but daily requests about power management and video accelearation issues (UVD/shaders). So maybe the AMD-ATI devs reading here should note to their superiors that these things and some 3d performance improvements seem to be a really pressing point among users. To give that more priority.

About the lack of coders: I wish I could code. Then I'd like to spend some time on that stuff. But I decided to study chemistry instead of informatics / coding. And now I am partially even working on weekends on my PhD stuff, revising student's lab protocols and revising proposals for scholarships from foreign students and whatsnot. :/
So no chances for me to get into coding rand contributing.

All I can do is to spend some beer, cola or Mate tea for devs to keep them in a good mood. ;-)

[89c51]

At least here on Phoronix I rarely see anybody complain about missing OpenCL features but daily requests about power management and video accelearation issues (UVD/shaders). So maybe the AMD-ATI devs reading here should note to their superiors that these things and some 3d performance improvements seem to be a really pressing point among users. To give that more priority.

Probably you don't see people complaining about OpenCl because the computer already does what is supposed to do (period). I mean it won't matter much if a computation takes a bit longer to complete for the average user. On the PM and VA things are different. ie. People see their batteries draining much earlier and CPUs hit 100% when playing Youtube videos hence you get more complains.

[agd5f]

Probably you don't see people complaining about OpenCl because the computer already does what is supposed to do (period). I mean it won't matter much if a computation takes a bit longer to complete for the average user. On the PM and VA things are different. ie. People see their batteries draining much earlier and CPUs hit 100% when playing Youtube videos hence you get more complains.

People that just want to watch youtube videos probably aren't running Linux. The percentage of Linux users that want fast OpenCL is actually pretty large. Most large scale Linux users are not consumers.