Better Fan Control Support Coming To The Open-Source Radeon Driver

[this.paradis]

Yes, finally! Well, I'm not saying, that I will be fully satisfied after working fan control, but I will be really happy, because I don't like noise.

[Jai01]

Supported cards ?

Hi !

I am a new linux user and I am still trying to figure out the best drivers for my old notebook graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4570)
I went through the post and the forum posts as well, but I have yet to figure out if the patch will affect my card.
I am currently using Linux kernel 3.2 with fglrx on elementary OS Luna. I am unable to upgrade to a newer version of the OS because the proprietary drivers lack support for the same. The open source drivers support the newer kernels, but they reduce my battery life to half an hour due to the fan running at full speed.
Could someone explain what 'SI/CI cards' mean and what cards will be supported by the patch ?

Thank you !

[this.paradis]

Hi !

I am a new linux user and I am still trying to figure out the best drivers for my old notebook graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4570)
I went through the post and the forum posts as well, but I have yet to figure out if the patch will affect my card.
I am currently using Linux kernel 3.2 with fglrx on elementary OS Luna. I am unable to upgrade to a newer version of the OS because the proprietary drivers lack support for the same. The open source drivers support the newer kernels, but they reduce my battery life to half an hour due to the fan running at full speed.
Could someone explain what 'SI/CI cards' mean and what cards will be supported by the patch ?

Thank you !

SI means Southern Islands/Sea Islands (HD7000, HD8000 and Rx 200 cards) and CI Cayman (?). I'm not sure if this patch will help you.

[plasmasnake]

Hi !

I am a new linux user and I am still trying to figure out the best drivers for my old notebook graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4570)
I went through the post and the forum posts as well, but I have yet to figure out if the patch will affect my card.
I am currently using Linux kernel 3.2 with fglrx on elementary OS Luna. I am unable to upgrade to a newer version of the OS because the proprietary drivers lack support for the same. The open source drivers support the newer kernels, but they reduce my battery life to half an hour due to the fan running at full speed.
Could someone explain what 'SI/CI cards' mean and what cards will be supported by the patch ?

Thank you !

According to wikipedia, the Mobility Radeon HD 4570 is the RV710 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ocessing_units), so that would be handled by r600g: http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

For DPM (Dynamic Power Management) it says "DONE". It looks like that was added last year, in June 2013 in the 3.11 kernel: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTM5NjE

Also, this patch only affects desktop cards which have their own fan - not laptops, where the fan is controlled by the system. But if DPM is not working, it would cause your card to never downclock when idle, which would be why your fan would still need to run at full blast. I'd assume that if DPM works, your problem should be solved.

[bridgman]

SI means Southern Islands/Sea Islands (HD7000, HD8000 and Rx 200 cards) and CI Cayman (?). I'm not sure if this patch will help you.

Southern Islands (SI): CAPE VERDE, PITCAIRN, TAHITI, OLAND, HAINAN HD7750 - HD7970 except 7790, R9 270, R9 280, R7 240, R7 250
Sea Islands (CI): BONAIRE, KABINI, MULLINS, KAVERI, HAWAII HD7790, R7 260, R9 290

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2

Cayman is actually Northern Islands (NI) with an R9xx shader core (the rest of NI family has R8xx)

[Adarion]

I am a new linux user and I am still trying to figure out the best drivers for my old notebook graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4570) ...

Hmm. Either way your HD 4570 M is neither SI nor CI or VI. It is an older model probably belonging to R600 or R700. That said, I have the impression that while (dedicated) desktop cards work normally nicely with the free driver the mobile chips might require a lot of quirks. I think that there is a certain degree of freedom for the notebook maker to tune and modify around the actual graphics core and build custom cooling solutions. Of course running an old distro to keep legacy fglrx is not great, but neither is a noisy fan that drains your battery.
You could try with a very recent kernel and driver stack again with the free driver and see if that helps. You might even just give a live distribution a try (but make sure they actually load "real" GPU drivers not a VESA driver (which is universal and nearly failsafe but does not have any fancy features). See if that works.
Other than that you could try to file a bugreport but be prepared to have some info about your model at hand.

[Jai01]

Thanks !!

Thank you this.Paradis, Plasmasnake, Bridgman and Adarion !!! That cleared up a lot of my doubts and more ! I will now try a new live distribution as Adarion suggested with DPM turned on and see if that improves my battery life.

You might even just give a live distribution a try (but make sure they actually load "real" GPU drivers not a VESA driver (which is universal and nearly failsafe but does not have any fancy features). See if that works.

Adarion, could you clarify what "real GPU drivers" refers to here ?

[Adarion]

Also, this patch only affects desktop cards which have their own fan - not laptops, where the fan is controlled by the system. But if DPM is not working, it would cause your card to never downclock when idle, which would be why your fan would still need to run at full blast. I'd assume that if DPM works, your problem should be solved.

Just having noticed this post, that is also very possible. So it is maybe not the GPU part itself but the system fan driver. The GPU chip itself might work and do all the clocking and gating it has available, but the system fan just runs on full speed. That could be related to a typical ACPI problem, bad ACPI tables or something. Also here you could try a very recent kernel. The ACPI system should be more robust by now. Translated: It does not keep strictly to the ACPI specs but actually expects the tables to be faulty MSFT ones and reacts to it. If that doesn't help, bugreport might help but you might need different info then.

[Jai01]

Thank you !!

To the moderator: Please reject this post in case it is reposted. I am posting it again becuase I am not sure if the last post did get through.

Thank you this.paradis, bridgman, plasmasnake and Adarion !! That cleared up a lot of my doubts and more ! I will try a live distribution as Adarion has suggested with DPM enabled to see if the fan speed is under control now.

You might even just give a live distribution a try (but make sure they actually load "real" GPU drivers not a VESA driver (which is universal and nearly failsafe but does not have any fancy features).

Could you clarify what "real GPU drivers" refers to here ? Are they not the open source drivers that come installed with latest ubuntu builds or elementary os builds (an older version of which, I am using currently)

[Adarion]

Could you clarify what "real GPU drivers" refers to here ? Are they not the open source drivers that come installed with latest ubuntu builds or elementary os builds (an older version of which, I am using currently)

Well, a live distribution (that runs directly from a CD or USB stick without touching your hard disk or need for an install) is intended to run virtually everywhere. Some of them are also used as repair systems or emergency boot "discs". For that reason in the past some of them often just used a VESA driver (think of MS Windows secured mode), which just gives you a limited set of resolutions and if you are lucky more than 265 colours. The good thing is that this virtually always works on every chip. The downside is it can't do more than bringing the image to the screen. No acceleration (e.g. scrolling in a browser like Firefox feels jerky), no 3d, no power management.
Well, it is something, or, better than nothing, but not even remotely close to a "real" driver.

More recent distributions might recognize your graphics chips and load the appropriate driver. Of course that will very likely be a free driver, not a binary blob (like nvidias blob or AMD's fglrx (Catalyst)). So in your case it might load KMS from the kernel and then use the mesa, libdrm and X components. In that case the driver should kick in and give you screen but also acceleration and power management. Moreover you could hope that a modern kernel will also get along with the ACPI implementation of your notebook and work around the strange parts and hopefully put the power saving functions to use and spin your fan down when it is cool enough.

You can find out which driver was loaded by looking at your kernel output (using dmesg and grep) or/and also at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log. You can search that output with grep for things like "DRM" "direct rendering" "UVD" "AMD" and so on. Remember, grep is case sensitive so test multiple ways of writing something.
Also Xorg.0.log may be interesting to grep for (EE) which means the line after (EE) contains error messages if something went wrong. Likely some font paths that are not correct, but there might also be messages of more importance and insight when it comes to GPU drivers.