OSS ATI still causes my fans to spin fast!

[markg85]

Hi,

I was eager to try out the new linux kernel (2.6.36) and the latest oss ati driver for my onboard "Mobility Radeon HD 4650", but am actually disappointed. Yes, it works! That's one major thing, but the power management seems to utterly fail.

I've had to set the power profile to:
echo mid > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

note: changing mid to "low" works but doesn't seem to affect the fan speed.

to get some fan speed down, but it still works like this:
fans off for ~30 seconds
fans fully or nearly fully on for ~5 minutes
then off again
then fully or nearly fully on again for ~5 minutes..

That is highly distracting!

I tried the "dynpm" power_method, but that gives me flickering and i'm not even on a dualscreen setup.

So, is there a better way to have fan auto fan control? I'm using ArchLinux and it's fully up to date

I was kinda expecting the fan control would "work" for pre 2.6.36 kernels and would certainly work with 2.6.36... Guess i was wrong since i notice no difference at all between 2.6.35 and 2.6.36

Regards,
Mark

[pingufunkybeat]

It's possible that your Mobility chip does not have a "mid" profile, so only "high" and "low" work as intended.

Can you monitor the temperature and see how it reacts to changing the profile (give it a few minutes to adjust).

[rohcQaH]

if you have enabled and mounted debugfs, you can view your current frequencies in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info

note that radeon does not actually have it's own fan management (like fglrx does); it relies on the fan management build into the card.

[markg85]

How can i monitor the temperature? I have lm_sensors installed along with xsensors, but nothing shows up in xsensors...

[RealNC]

It shows in KDE's System Monitor as the "radeon" sensor.

[blackshard]

Mobility Radeon? Is this a notebook, isn't it? I think the fan of a notebook controlled by motherboard/ACPI and not by video card driver.

Maybe you can blame the driver that doesn't put the chip in low power.

[markg85]

It shows in KDE's System Monitor as the "radeon" sensor.

If you could provide a screenshot? I have KDE (trunk) but don't know what you mean by the system monitor.. I wasn't aware the system monitor could also show GPU temps.. I certainly can't find it.

@blackshard
Yes, it's a notebook indeed.
Ah.. i HATE half working things like this.

[RealNC]

K Menu -> Applications -> System -> System Monitor

Screenshot:

http://i53.tinypic.com/jq6i9v.png

On the right, notice the sensor I used to get the GPU temp (Hardware Sensors -> Radeon -> Temperature 1).

[markg85]

K Menu -> Applications -> System -> System Monitor

Screenshot:

http://i53.tinypic.com/jq6i9v.png

On the right, notice the sensor I used to get the GPU temp (Hardware Sensors -> Radeon -> Temperature 1).

What kind of system monitor is that? I have the KDE system monitor, but have never seen or been able to get temperature readings!

What did you install to get this and don't say you didn't since the default functionality of the system monitor does not have temperature stuff (unless i'm completely wrong but i doubt that).

I don't even have the tab: "Drop sensors here" ...

[RealNC]

System Monitor is easy to use :P Just create new tabs on your own. What you see by default are tabs that are already shipped by default. But you can create more.

Create a new one with 3 rows and 1 column (File->New Tab). Drop each sensor in each row. You can name the tabs whatever you like ("Drop sensors here" was just the default name, which can be changed; "Temps" for example.)

I thought KDE users know how to discover each application's options