AMD Has Massive Radeon Patch Set - Power Management!

[droste]

You need this kernel:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/log/?h=drm-next-3.11-wip-5

The new firmware (*_smc.bin) for /lib/firmware/radeon:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/

and add radeon.dpm=1 to your kernel command line

to check if it is using the new code check /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method (it should contain "dpm") and dmesg should show "[drm] radeon: dpm initialized" and some power states (dmesg | grep power).

If you did all this you're at the same point as Xipeos and I where it is running but we don't know if it's doing something ;-)

[ElderSnake]

Thanks droste!

This should be fun

[Bushido_root]

You need this kernel:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/log/?h=drm-next-3.11-wip-5

The new firmware (*_smc.bin) for /lib/firmware/radeon:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/

and add radeon.dpm=1 to your kernel command line

to check if it is using the new code check /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method (it should contain "dpm") and dmesg should show "[drm] radeon: dpm initialized" and some power states (dmesg | grep power).

If you did all this you're at the same point as Xipeos and I where it is running but we don't know if it's doing something ;-)

Would this also apply to me too? I'm running on Ubuntu (12.10), this laptop's card is a Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series (Evergreen I think), but the *_smc.bin for it isn't there, so would I get CEDAR?

Lets say if I do install and go through with this, I don't have to uninstall the current radeon open source driver I'm using now, do I?

[Bushido_root]

droste (or to whoever xD):

Would this also apply to me too? I'm running on Ubuntu (12.10), this laptop's card is a Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series (Evergreen I think), but the *_smc.bin for it isn't there, so would I get CEDAR?

Lets say if I do install and go through with this, I don't have to uninstall the current radeon open source driver I'm using now, do I?

[ElderSnake]

Uh oh, same as Bushido. Mine is a Wrestler (SUMO) and there are no *smc variants..

wait silly me, Wrestler is PALM apparently? So confusing Lol. But same problem applies.

[droste]

Yes it's the same for every distro out there as this is a pure kernel thing and you don't need to reinstall the userspace part of the open source driver. The only thing that you can't do is use this together with fglrx (but why would you want to do that? ;-))

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_...5xxx.29_Series says that mobility 54xx is cedar so the cedar_smc.bin file is the right one for you.

/edit:
There's no harm done if you simply download all *_smc.bin files and put them in /lib/firmware/radeon. The kernel module picks the right one.

[Bushido_root]

Haha, yes, fglrx is horrible.

Cedar it is, I'll just get that because it's the right one for my card. I don't think I'm going to test this out yet until I know for a fact that it works for others (their radeon open source driver isn't making their laptops/computer hot anymore :b).

For now I edited /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile and set it to "mid" (which lowers the gpu freq drastically so I get some lag on certain webpages), laptop is at 60 degrees C and hardly ever passes 66.

When I hear from others that this works just fine (even better than setting the profile_profile like how I did), I'll go for it ^_^

Thanks for the reply droste!

[agd5f]

APUs don't need smc ucode. Only 7xx+ dGPUs need it.

[ElderSnake]

so does that mean I need to update the firmware files at all?

Anyhow my first test didnt go so well. It seems to initialise the power settings, but after a few seconds in X, it has some panic attack and I have a garbled screen which slowly turns whiter and whiter...like its frosting up lol.

Still working out how to provide more information, if I boot into single user mode it's fine... just when I get into X. Rebooting into my previous 3.9.3 kernel and all is normal.

EDIT: Reinstalling my distro firmware and removing the smc files fixed it. Sort of. At first boot the freeze and "frosting up" happens, however from what I could see in the console screen at bootup, it fails to activate UVD or some such, then does a soft reset on the GPU. Then it continues on.

Hmm. Anyway, it's working! My temps are below 60c for the first time using the FOSS drivers Thank you!!

EDIT2:

[ 12.382410] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 13.394491] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 14.406570] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 15.418649] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 16.430728] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 17.442803] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 18.454906] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 19.467006] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, trying to reset the VCPU!!!
[ 19.486973] [drm:r600_uvd_init] *ERROR* UVD not responding, giving up!!!
[ 19.497162] [drm:evergreen_startup] *ERROR* radeon: error initializing UVD (-1).

That's the error itself, guess it's the Unified Video Decoder.

[Bushido_root]

so does that mean I need to update the firmware files at all?

Anyhow my first test didnt go so well. It seems to initialise the power settings, but after a few seconds in X, it has some panic attack and I have a garbled screen which slowly turns whiter and whiter...like its frosting up lol.

Still working out how to provide more information, if I boot into single user mode it's fine... just when I get into X. Rebooting into my previous 3.9.3 kernel and all is normal.

EDIT: Reinstalling my distro firmware and removing the smc files fixed it. Sort of. At first boot the freeze and "frosting up" happens, however from what I could see in the console screen at bootup, it fails to activate UVD or some such, then does a soft reset on the GPU. Then it continues on.

Hmm. Anyway, it's working! My temps are below 60c for the first time using the FOSS drivers Thank you!!

EDIT2:


That's the error itself, guess it's the Unified Video Decoder.

Good to hear everything worked out!
Interesting, I'll first try it out without putting the CEDAR_smc.bin under /lib/firmware/radeon
So you added the radeon.dpm=1 in the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash " (after splash) of /etc/default/grub file yes?

Found out that the kernel 3.11-wip-5 from git is 3.10-rc5 with the patches applied to it. So I'm just going to install the .deb files and install that.