Originally posted by sylware
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Open ATI Driver To Receive PowerPlay Push?
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Originally posted by agd5f View PostThe thermal chip information is stored in atombios data tables on all chips. R6xx and R7xx have built in fan/thermal controllers, however, not all oems use them. You still need driver code to actually query the thermal information.
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Originally posted by netkas View PostIn case to give users full access to clocks/fan/temps only 3rd item is needed, for things like - preventing overheating, overclocking, power saving (I/user can get 2d clocks from atombios with help of RBE and use it)
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Originally posted by agd5f View PostIt's possible, but it's still a lot of work. Besides, just exposing clocks to users does not ultimately save much power or give a good user experience. There are a lot of factors to consider:
- Bandwidth. Do I have enough memory bandwidth in this power state to properly feed all active displays as well as the drawing engine? Not enough bandwidth can cause drawing stalls or glitches and blanking or flickering of the displays.
- Frequency. Is the current clock rate high enough to finish the current operations within an acceptable time window? Often, it's a better user experience and saves more power to bump the GPU to a higher power state than you might think so the operation finishes sooner. Set it too low and performance will suck.
- Thermal/fan controllers. These are 3rd party chips connected via i2c. Drivers need to be written for each of these chips before they can be used. Then you need to wire them up to some interface so you can access the information. There are existing drivers for some of these chips, but we need to write a radeon i2c algo module to expose the radeon i2c buses so they can be used by other drivers. This in itself is a fair amount of work.
- Power mode changes. This needs to be done during the blanking period or when the displays are off to avoid visual glitches. Often the latencies required make it hard or impossible to fit this into a vblank period.
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Originally posted by sylware View PostHu? Bridgman told me on IRC that from r7xx it's done through the ATOM bios?
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@agd5f
Thanks for exposing these problems and thoughts behind the code. It's quite interesting.
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Originally posted by agd5f View Post- Thermal/fan controllers. These are 3rd party chips connected via i2c. Drivers need to be written for each of these chips before they can be used. Then you need to wire them up to some interface so you can access the information. There are existing drivers for some of these chips, but we need to write a radeon i2c algo module to expose the radeon i2c buses so they can be used by other drivers. This in itself is a fair amount of work.
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Originally posted by netkas View Postisn't it possible to create some interface, based on sysfs, to control clocks/fan speed?
- Bandwidth. Do I have enough memory bandwidth in this power state to properly feed all active displays as well as the drawing engine? Not enough bandwidth can cause drawing stalls or glitches and blanking or flickering of the displays.
- Frequency. Is the current clock rate high enough to finish the current operations within an acceptable time window? Often, it's a better user experience and saves more power to bump the GPU to a higher power state than you might think so the operation finishes sooner. Set it too low and performance will suck.
- Thermal/fan controllers. These are 3rd party chips connected via i2c. Drivers need to be written for each of these chips before they can be used. Then you need to wire them up to some interface so you can access the information. There are existing drivers for some of these chips, but we need to write a radeon i2c algo module to expose the radeon i2c buses so they can be used by other drivers. This in itself is a fair amount of work.
- Power mode changes. This needs to be done during the blanking period or when the displays are off to avoid visual glitches. Often the latencies required make it hard or impossible to fit this into a vblank period.
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Originally posted by Louise View PostYes, but then why use BSD? I mean, Linux and BSD use the same user space applications, I guess from a desktop users point of view they should fell the same?
I don't mind, I will code other drivers more fitted to the Linux kernel (license wise and code wise). We can share hardware programming knowledge but code will be different.
What I can do, is take their code from a certain point, re-license under GNU GPL and obliterate cross-kernel code. It is *not* like closing the code: aka the ultimate treason.
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Originally posted by sylware View PostAFAIK, it does not.
"Ripping closed source" means reverse engineering the closed source driver. That's what the people of the nouveau project are doing on the nvidia Linux driver. All that because nvidia refuse to publish the hardware programming manual of their GPUs. This is a gigantic loss of time. I would not be surprised if some companies with an interest of slowing down GNU/Linux on the desktop are behind all this.
Remember: the target is to have by default open source OS installed on systems with optimal code driving your hardware.
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