AMD Radeon DRM Gets More Early DPM Fixes

AMD's Alex Deucher has sent in another Git pull request for the Radeon DRM code for the in-development Linux 3.11 kernel. As with the other secondary pulls, this code update is about bettering up the state of Radeon dynamic power management.

The long-awaited Radeon dynamic power management support is of much interest to Linux desktop users as can be judged by the flurry of comments and activity around the topic that's been happening within the Phoronix Forums. The Radeon DPM support is one of the major Linux 3.11 features.

While Linux 3.11-rc1 isn't even out yet, the Radeon DRM code has already been updated multiple times within the DRM tree. These updates have been to provide end-user fixes for the DPM support along with sysfs and debugfs support.

This afternoon another pull request was submitted by Alex Deucher. This time it has more fixes. The latest fixes include fixing certain programming on RV7XX GPUs, adding a helper for calculating vblank times and new DPM checks against vblank times for the various generations of AMD hardware.

These latest changes are about checking on the possibility of changing the memory clock frequency during the vblank time, in order to prevent artifacts from being rendered to the screen if changing the memory frequency while a scan out is occurring.

Once Linux 3.11-rc1 has been released, Phoronix testing will commence of this Radeon DPM support (and updated HD 7000 series tests) and by then hopefully any show-stopping bugs will be ironed out.