More Radeon Power Management Improvements

[bridgman]

The bug reports you linked to aren't actually about power management "not working" (ie not reducing power consumption), they both relate to screen artifacts when running in the "low" profile. Is your problem best described as "even when running with low profile I am not seeing a power reduction", or is it more like "I have not measured power consumption when running on low because of the display artifacts" ?

If you are still seeing the display artifacts with the latest code could you update the fdo ticket ? That's the one the driver developers will see, not a mandriva ticket.

[agd5f]

Low mode is known to cause display problems on some laptops which is why I initially disallowed it when displays were active and only later added it as an option for users to force low mode despite potential problems. auto switches between mid and high depending on ac state. Unless low is explicitly forced on, the driver will only use it when the displays are off (dpms active).

[agd5f]

If you are having problems with low, try mid instead.

[DF5JT]

If you are having problems with low, try mid instead.

Thanks for the advice.

I tried new_pll={0,1} at "low" setting without any change.

Mowever, "mid" works fine now and actually reduces the GPU temperature by roughly 4 degrees. This is both true with my Mandriva setup and the recent Fedora 14 Alpha, so there has been some trmendous work going on and I'd like to thank you for that.

I don't want to open a new thread for this, because it seems rather specific to my hardware, but despite many people praising gallium 3D performance, on F14 (and previous experiments with mesa git), it's pretty abysmal on my FireGL V5200. No game works (Wolfenstein, Serous Sam), Google Earth stutters like hell and while usually I use mplayer with -vo gl for 720p movies with gallium 3D enabled this simply stutters along at 1-3 fps.

I understand that some people are really happy with gallium 3D performance, so I wonder if there is anything I can do to have this same wonderful experience?

[agd5f]

low/mid are not valid options for new_pll. new_pll has nothing to do with power management.

[DF5JT]

low/mid are not valid options for new_pll. new_pll has nothing to do with power management.

With all the googling for solutions I came across hints that new_pll=1 or 0 might actually solve the problem with screen distortion. I am well aware that"mid/low" are only options for the new profile based PM.

[agd5f]

It's possible, but I've never heard of that actually fixing the issues with the low power mode. The option is useful for fixing screen flickering or distortion in normal operation due to the monitor not liking certain pll divider combinations and some bugs in the spread spectrum code in older kernels. I think those conditions just got mixed up with to the low power issues.

[Rabauke]

It would be kind if someone could edit http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature and add a short synopsis of how en-/disabling radeon power management and what options further are available and how to read out temperatures. I think, there is something semi-official like this missing.

[Boerkel]

When i'm using mid or low scrolling is pretty choppy in chromium. Only with default and high i can scroll nomally with the scrollbar.

[Schmaker]

May someone post his experiences with power management in OSS driver in comparison to Catalyst? In my case i lost like 33% battery life :/