atieventsd

One of the new features for the ATI fglrx 8.26.18 drivers is the introduction of the atievents daemon. At this point the ATI fglrx daemon supports hotkey display switching (only with IBM/Lenovo laptops at this time), DFP hotplug, and thermal event power management. If you're not a Lenovo notebook user, the key benefit to the atieventsd daemon should largely be the thermal event power management. Basically this feature will use PowerPlay to down-clock the GPU if the reported temperature exceeds safe levels, and will continue to run at reduced speeds until returning to safe levels. Shortly I will be examining all of the atieventsd features, and hopefully we will continue to see additional daemon improvements from ATI.