AMDGPU PowerPlay Is Working Great So Far; Here's An Ubuntu PowerPlay Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 12 November 2015 at 03:29 PM EST. 26 Comments
RADEON
With AMD having published PowerPlay support for AMDGPU I've been busy today running tests on this new power management code that finally allows Tonga and Fiji GPUs to operate at their full-speed when using the open-source Linux graphics driver.

Tomorrow will be full results for the Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" and Radeon R9 Fury "Fiji" graphics cards comparing with/with-out PowerPlay support to the newly published Git code. However, short story is, the new AMDGPU kernel code works:
steam amdgpu
It's a pity that the PowerPlay support won't land until Linux 4.5... The details on that teaser result can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

If you're an Ubuntu Linux user and relying upon AMDGPU with a discrete graphics card, I uploaded my Debian kernel package that I built this morning against Alex Deucher's PowerPlay branch. You can find this 4.3-based PowerPlay kernel via linux-image-4.3.0-powerplay2_4.3.0-powerplay2-3_amd64.deb.

Stay tuned for the exciting and full PowerPlay open-source results on Phoronix tomorrow. This weekend I'll also likely show how the Tonga/Fiji performance compares to other AMD GCN GPUs still on the Radeon DRM kernel driver. Comparison results against Catalyst might come if there's enough reader support.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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