Updated and Optimized Ubuntu Free Graphics Drivers

[pali]

@oibaf: Is radeonsi dri driver supported by your ppa (for precise or other versions)? And is opengl working?

[oibaf]

@oibaf: Is radeonsi dri driver supported by your ppa (for precise or other versions)? And is opengl working?

Yes, but on raring (13.04) only.

[pali]

And you planning in future add radeonsi support also to precise? Because precise is supported until 2017.

[Guest]

Hi, just read about these drivers, and I'm really interested in giving them a go. I have an Acer Aspire V3-551G-X419 laptop with AMD Dual Graphics (7660G iGPU + 7670M dGPU), Xubuntu 13.04 x86_64, and today's pre-built 3.11 daily kernel.

Just had a few questions:

1. How can I tell which GPU is doing the processing? Can I specify a GPU to do all processing (I'd rather just have the dGPU do everything, unless the switchable graphics implementation currently is good enough to handle switching based on load)?
2. How do I check GPU statistics (clock speed, GPU usage, video memory usage, etc.)? Can this be polled from different GPUs?
3. Do I need to do anything special at all to enable the radeonsi driver, on both the iGPU and dGPU? Checking lspci -v shows both my GPUs using the kernel driver radeon, is this ok? The only things i've done so far was update the drivers via the PPA, and updated the kernel.

[bridgman]

The radeon kernel driver handles all GPU generations from r100 through HD8xxx, so no problem there.

Names like "radeonsi" (also r300, r600) refer to the HW layer used by the Mesa OpenGL (3D) driver. The radeonsi driver supports GPUs from HD77xx and up, so AFAIK both of your GPUs would use r600 rather than radeonsi.

I'll leave the other questions to someone who has used dual GPUs recently, but running glxinfo should give you an idea which GPU is being used. Look for the "OpenGL renderer..." string. You might need the decoder ring at :

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

[Guest]

Doing a glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" gives me Gallium 0.4 on AMD ARUBA, which if I understand right, could be a label for either GPU (both fall under Northern Islands).

I also notice that when I first start up a game under Wine, framerate is decent. If I close it and re-open it though, I lose about 20 FPS (it's capped at 60 from forced Vsync normally I believe). Not entirely sure what the cause of this is, but any ideas?

[bridgman]

IIRC Aruba is the integrated GPU. The dGPU would show as Turks, Thames, or something like that.

[Guest]

IIRC Aruba is the integrated GPU. The dGPU would show as Turks, Thames, or something like that.

Ah, got it, sort of anyway. If I do glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" I get AMD ARUBA but if I do DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" I get AMD TURKS. If I understand this right, for any application I want to run on the dGPU, I have to use that DRI_PRIME=1 command first?

I followed this guide here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=139413 and also updated to Xubuntu 13.10 (yesterday's daily). From my understanding, Xserver 1.14 is required for handling multiple GPUs in Muxless setups.

[pali]

For codenames look at: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2
ARUBA is Northern Islands

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Doing a glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" gives me Gallium 0.4 on AMD ARUBA, which if I understand right, could be a label for either GPU (both fall under Northern Islands).

Also try "DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep renderer" (output will be about dGPU).

clock speed, GPU usage, video memory usage, etc.)? Can this be polled from different GPUs?

If you arleady using radeon.dpm:
iGPU clocks: cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
dGPU clocks: cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/radeon_pm_info
For info about VRAM run apps like this: "GALLIUM_HUD="fps;requested-VRAM" steam" (add "DRI_PRIME=1" if you want to run Steam on dGPU).