How do I enable power management on radeon cards? (kernel 2.6.34)

maladeus · #1 25th March 2010, 01:06 PM

My laptop overheats without the proprietary ati drivers. Since 2.6.34 is supposed to support some power options I went ahead and installed rc2 on a F13 alpha but I'm not getting that much of a temperature drop. I'm wondering if these features are not enabled by default or if there is anything else I must do to activate power management.

Solution:
add radeon.modeset=1 radeon.dynpm=1 on grub before booting. It knocks out 10-15ºC.

Fenrin · #2 14th April 2010, 01:48 PM

hey,

I'm just wondering is power saving with Radeon driver ati-6.13.0 and kernel 2.6.33 enabled by default or not?

If I use the radeon.dynpm=1 option, I cannot decrypt my home partition at the boot. When "/home is password protected:" appears on my screen, I enter my password (it shows the characters like they are, not as *), then I press Enter and every character I wrote turned into a star...
I guess this is a bug. Im using Fedora 13 Beta with kernel 2.6.1-24, only home partition is encrypted.

But its not necessary for me to have powersaving enabled, I'm on a desktop computer.

screamin_jesus · #3 7th May 2010, 12:33 AM

You need toe 2.6.34 kernel for power management with the OSS ati driver, unless fedora has backported the stuff back to their 2.6.33.

andrewthomas · #4 15th May 2010, 04:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maladeus

I'm wondering if these features are not enabled by default or if there is anything else I must do to activate power management.

They sure seem to be on by default.

Code:

2.6.34-0.49.rc7.git0.fc14.x86_64
[drm] radeon defaulting to kernel modesetting
[drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled
[drm] radeon: power management initialized

edit: ok, I guess that I was wrong

Code:

[    0.512410] [drm] radeon: dynamic power management enabled
[    0.512470] [drm] radeon: power management initialized

korpenkraxar · #5 20th May 2010, 10:42 AM

It seems to me that only upgrading the kernel to 2.6.34 is far from enough to get i e a low power profile going. Does anyone one know what the plans are in incorporating more of the cutting edge power-management found in drm-radeon-testing and the libdrm + X11 userspace stack in upcoming Rawhide packages?

jvillain · #6 20th May 2010, 04:41 PM

The first thing is that Fedora 13 release should be due shortly. When that happens the current raw hide will be branched Fedora 14 and a lot of people testing in 13 will switch to 14. That will get a bunch more people testing.

For info on what the various drivers are up to etc I like to use this site as it tends to focus on the cutting edge and does a fair bit of testing. They have gone a bit Ubuntu crazy lately which makes me want to puke but other than that they are pretty good.

http://www.phoronix.com

Zanpactou · #7 25th May 2010, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by korpenkraxar

It seems to me that only upgrading the kernel to 2.6.34 is far from enough to get i e a low power profile going. Does anyone one know what the plans are in incorporating more of the cutting edge power-management found in drm-radeon-testing and the libdrm + X11 userspace stack in upcoming Rawhide packages?

Yeah, I've read that they are hoping to merge for 2.6.35. IIRC their merge request was the first one sent to Linus when he opened the merge window for 2.6.35.
Lots of people interested in those patches and understandably so.

Thanks,
Zanpactou

RogerBacon · #8 3rd June 2010, 11:43 PM

dmesg :
radeon: Unknown parameter `dynpm'

2.6.34-20.fc14.x86_64

Mhm..

korpenkraxar · #9 4th June 2010, 08:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RogerBacon

dmesg :
radeon: Unknown parameter `dynpm'

2.6.34-20.fc14.x86_64

Mhm..

Where did you get that kernel release version? I am on 2.6.34-11.fc14.x86_64 and have not seen any updates in rawhide.

RogerBacon · #10 4th June 2010, 03:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by korpenkraxar

Where did you get that kernel release version? I am on 2.6.34-11.fc14.x86_64 and have not seen any updates in rawhide.

kernel-2.6.34-20.fc14 kyle 2010-06-02 16:22:36

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/p...fo?packageID=8

Wait a day or two so your mirror can pick it up

---------- Post added at 10:44 AM CDT ---------- Previous post was at 10:42 AM CDT ----------

Well, i just answered my own question

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/b...buildID=176236
* Tue Jun 01 2010 Kyle McMartin <kyle@redhat.com>
- disable radeon_pm for now.

korpenkraxar · #11 19th June 2010, 09:37 PM

I have a Thinkpad W500 with a dual Intel/ATI GPU combo. This laptop has a pretty accurate thermal sensor for the Radeon GPU that can be read with gkrellm. Since the sensor only reports a temperature if the Radeon GPU is activated in the BIOS, I feel confident it reports the right readings.

Usually the temperature for the Radeon GPU idles around 67-70 degrees C and compared to when only the Intel GPU is active, this GPU has a tendency to bump the main CPU temperature up as well, to about 58-60 or so degrees C.

I just installed kernel-2.6.34-43.fc14 which according to the list of patches has had a lot of radeon power management work. I added:

Code:

radeon.pm=1

to grub.conf

and did this to switch to the low power usage profile after boot:

Code:

echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

Now, about 15 minutes later and in the same room and ambient temperature, gkrellm reports:

Code:

CPU 45.0
GPU 50.0

Dang! Wohoo!

I can still play videos just fine, although glxgears drops from about 1350fps to 300fps and moving around opaque windows in Fluxbox has a funny slow feel to it (which can easily be worked around by toggle that feature off in Flux).

Great to see some drastic improvement on the pm side of things!
I have a question though, can I activate the 'low' profile already on the grub kernel line?

EDIT: I should add that the CPU/GPU fan is still spinning at about 3000 rpms at this temperature. I had hopes that it would spontaneously switch to a less noisy state at those temps.

maladeus · #12 27th June 2010, 02:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RogerBacon

dmesg :
radeon: Unknown parameter `dynpm'

2.6.34-20.fc14.x86_64

Mhm..

There seems to be a regression on 2.6.34-2 onwards that renders dynpm unuseful. radeon.pm=1 still works but I cant get around to configure a dynamic power management.
2.6.35 doesn't even have a working KMS so things are looking gray. My advice is to downgrade to 2.6.34-2 and use dynpm. I get 78ºC idle on dynpm VS 92ºC radeon.pm=1. The only thing that kills me is the goddamn flash which tops 110ºC and reboots - Solution: limit your cores to 1.2GHZ, more than enough to watch video and it wont melt your laptop.

On another note there should be a compatible fglrx around the corner as open suse is out in two weeks so we should be able to use our laptops this summer.

korpenkraxar · #13 27th June 2010, 10:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maladeus

There seems to be a regression on 2.6.34-2 onwards that renders dynpm unuseful. radeon.pm=1 still works but I cant get around to configure a dynamic power management.
2.6.35 doesn't even have a working KMS so things are looking gray. My advice is to downgrade to 2.6.34-2 and use dynpm.

I have not upgraded my kernel yet since the one I have works quite well, but out of curiosity, what is the recommended way of locating and fetching past rawhide packages?

dd_wizard · #14 27th June 2010, 10:31 PM

Go to the koji page and enter kernel in the search box in the upper right corner.

dd_wizard

korpenkraxar · #15 27th June 2010, 10:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dd_wizard

Go to the koji page and enter kernel in the search box in the upper right corner.

dd_wizard

Thanks, crowdsource google ftw