ATI Support For PowerPlay on MacBook Pro

[glisse]

Thanks for the update. I hope this is not the end of the story but so far things don't look so great. At the mactel-linux-users list we tried to set the GPU clock speeds in windows and see if they would hold after a reboot but it does not:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=4b0472fc0706091625r4624527fra3fab0a518315feb%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=mactel-linux-users

Moreover, we wanted to see if the issue is really a BIOS issue or a buggy driver issue. It is definitely possible to change the clock speeds in Windows using the Omega drivers (that are not written by AMD/ATI but by someone else) so if there is a BIOS issue its specific to the way AMD/ATI implement it in their drivers and there _is_ a workaround. To confirm this we wanted to check whether PowerPlay worked in windows with the ATI driver. Jon Grosshart, who has win XP installed on his MBP C2D, suffered through trying to get the ATI drivers to install on windows which was apparently a pain (see the thread) but he said it doesn't even seem to have a powerplay option so there was no way to check.

The fact that with the Omega drivers it is possible to change the GPU clock speeds indicates that there is a way around whatever issue the AMD developers claim exists with the BIOS. Michael, if you're reading this I would appreciate it if you could point this out to the developers. There should be a way to get this to work in Linux if it does in Windows (with the Omega drivers).

I'm not sure what to do next. I tried contacting the Omega developer (who presumably has an NDA) to ask for his advice but he just said he doesn't work on linux.

Perhaps this is something the Open source driver can fix? I would be happy to run my machine with only 2-d support for now if it ran cooler. Apparently from the post on Phoronix these drivers don't yet support the MacBook Pro (I'm not sure where Michael got this information from since I didn't hear anything about it on the mactel-lists).

Any further ideas are welcome.

To the best of my knowledge omega driver are just AMD driver which are binary tweaked (ie they does not have the source they just change a couple of value in windows registery) so they have not much knowlegde beside windows registry things.

That said the clock things could be handled in macbook pro and does not need the bios, the tools AMD released need the bios and i guess none of the developer of the tools want to spend time to do it properly by talking to the card.

I will shortly take a look at this as i want to save some power on my mbp. Once i am done with that i am sure that someone can wrote a tools that will work with fglrx.

[dpope]

To the best of my knowledge omega driver are just AMD driver which are binary tweaked (ie they does not have the source they just change a couple of value in windows registery) so they have not much knowlegde beside windows registry things.

That said the clock things could be handled in macbook pro and does not need the bios, the tools AMD released need the bios and i guess none of the developer of the tools want to spend time to do it properly by talking to the card.

I will shortly take a look at this as i want to save some power on my mbp. Once i am done with that i am sure that someone can wrote a tools that will work with fglrx.

Hi,

Can I presume this is Jerome Glisse? If so, thanks for your response. If you want people to test this or help you out with it I'm sure you can find many volunteers, myself included on the mactel-development mailing list.

thanks,
Sheer

[dpope]

Hi Michael,

On a slightly related note several MBP owners are ditching their machines and thinking of buying new MBP's with the Nvidia cards. While this may or may not address the problems people have been having it still strikes me as somewhat unfortunate that we're (myself included) so eager to fish out our money to a company like Apple that has shown no interest what so ever in supporting linux. Unfortunately Apple produces very nice looking laptops that also have quite a few nice features (in particular battery life/weight/performance ratios seems pretty good). I would like to direct these people (and even potentially myself) to a laptop that has very good linux support and where we can expect some decent support from the company. Dell and Lenevo are obvious candidates but I have not found any site which compares modern high-end laptops for their linux support. I've seen on the mobile forums that there are several threads covering linux support on various laptops but I would like to suggest that it might be a good idea to post an article with your opinion on which laptops are really best suited for linux users in terms of support for all functionality (particularly hidden features like power management, etc...). This will not only help linux users make a good decision but might put some pressure on vendors to get their machines on that list. Just claiming to support Linux isn't as good as supporting it. For intance anyone (like Lenovo) who has ATI cards on supposedly linux friendly machines is not really supporting linux (though I saw that Lenovo also has nvidia cards now). Just a thought...

cheers,
Sheer

[anszom]

http://www.g2inf.one.pl/~anszom/MBP-ATI/

This is an experimental patched version of radeontool with a 'power' command which allows me to reduce the power usage on a MacBook Pro (core2duo edition) by ~8 watts.

Standard disclaimer:
I have very little idea what all the registers mean, so it is theoretically possible that thir patch won't work for your card, or it even may make it temporarily or permanently unusable. I don't take any responsibility for the results of using this code.
This said I honestly believe that it won't cause any harm

Usage:
1. compile
2. ./radeontool power low
3. enjoy a colder Macbook Pro

I have tested it only on my 64-bit gentoo linux, and with a low backlight setting and _without_ dynticks kernel (64-bit not available yet) the idle power usage is under 20 W. Console switching, suspend to ram and other actions may cause the fglrx driver to reset some of the settings, so it may be necessary to invoke radeontool from time to time to restore them.

Comments, improvements and bugfixes are welcome at:
qq <at> kuku <dot> eu <dot> org

Big thanks go to AMD for finally releasing the specs. Now I'm waiting for a driver which doesn't crash the system like windo^Wcrazy

[crumpet]

I am impressed.
Indeed the power drops by ~8W (From 35 W to 26-27W Fedora 7 - doing basically nothing)
This is for a Macbook pro 17" C2D using the 8.41

Interestingly the Catalyst Control Center shows no change of clock frequency

[pic0]

This works ! This is on a november 2006 MacBook Pro 15" C2D 2.16 GHz.

Power usage drops by 8W down to , battery life by 2 hours up to 3h30 !

Thanks a lot !!! I hope this work can be merged within the avivo driver or the soon-to-be-released novel radeon driver, or maybe into pommed.

[anszom]

This works ! This is on a november 2006 MacBook Pro 15" C2D 2.16 GHz.

Power usage drops by 8W down to

down to ... ?

battery life by 2 hours up to 3h30 !

Thanks a lot !!! I hope this work can be merged within the avivo driver or the soon-to-be-released novel radeon driver, or maybe into pommed.

3h30 ? I'm curious about your configuration - I have just finished testing and my laptop doesn't reach 3h. Do you use a tickless kernel?

[dpope]

Finally! anszom, I'm so glad you got this to work. After trying so many options and waiting on every new driver release I finally have a chance to use my machine decently under linux.

I installed the patched radeontool and everything work. Power usage went down ~7 W to a lowest level of 22 W (with screen brightness down). I'm sure I can do much better as my linux install is not ideal -- I'm half-way between fiesty and gutsy and still running 2.6.20 for some reason.

Unfortunately just after installing your the new radeontool I tried to upgrade gutsy to the newest version and somehow completely broke my install (update doesn't work and I can't seem to get on any kind of network even if I manually set my IPs and all). Looks like its time for a re-install but at least now I know I have something to look forward to ;-> many thanks again

[pic0]

down to ... ?

~20W

3h30 ? I'm curious about your configuration - I have just finished testing and my laptop doesn't reach 3h. Do you use a tickless kernel?

Yes I run a x86 tickless 2.6.22 kernel from Gutsy + some patches I found here and there. powertop reports between 200 and 250 wakeups/sec on average.
3h30 was what powertop reported, but I think that it is a little optimistic ... Actually it is more like 2h30-3h00 ...

But I think that there is still room for improvement.

Thanks again !

[crumpet]

To revisit this old subject - recently I installed gutsy and 8.42.3 driver ... and I find that powerplay is still not enabled by ATI so we still depend on this fix by Anszom (thanks again).... anyway enabling the power low option reduces power by ~ 9W... 32W down to 23 W...

glxgears runs at 2600 FPS at low power and 4900 FPS at full power

Question - is there anyway to encourage ATI to enable powerplay - this would obviously a boon for all laptop users...

Question 2 ... is there a preferred way to run the Anszom fix (needs to be root) at startup (I guess that it needs to be run after starting fglrx?)