Radeon DRM Gets New Information Ioctl Queries

For those using the Gallium3D HUD, RadeonTOP, or other utilities, more data is being exposed with new patches for the Radeon DRM driver.

Alex Deucher of AMD published a set of 22 patches that expose extra information now over their information ioctl. These queries expose new profiling parameters that can be exposed to user-space applications and also allow querying status registers without root privileges or ASIC-specific work. Among the new supported queries are for reading the GPU temperature, reading current core and memory clocks for all supported hardware, and the info ioctl register accessor.

It's a step in the right direction and I've long been pushing for the Linux graphics drivers to expose additional information. Sadly though none of these new queries are exposed over sysfs (except for the GPU thermal information) for those wishing to easily just script around or check on this data quickly from the command line. More pressing is that there's still no standardization between the DRM drivers for querying this data in a uniform manner but obtaining this performance/profiling information continues to be largely driver-specific -- of course, completely different code-paths too for reading this information from the proprietary drivers as working to obtain as much of this data as possible over the years with the Phoronix Test Suite.

The 22 patches can be found on the dri-devel list and will likely be found in the Linux 3.19 kernel unless David Airlie decides to pull them into drm-next in time for the 3.18 merge window.