GCN 1.1 On AMDGPU DRM Driver To Now Default To PowerPlay

When using a GCN 1.1 CIK / Sea Islands GPU with the non-default AMDGPU DRM driver, it will soon begin defaulting to use PowerPlay for power management rather than the old DPM code.

The AMDGPU PowerPlay support for Sea Islands is now in a state where using the newer PowerPlay support rather than the older Dynamic Power Management (DPM) code is in better shape. AMD plans to eventually drop this older DPM implementation from the AMDGPU kernel driver.

Alex Deucher at AMD sent out the default-changing patch this week while it looks like it's not going to make it for Linux 4.18 but rather 4.19.

There's nothing new to report meanwhile on the prospects to switching GCN 1.0/1.1 to AMDGPU DRM rather than Radeon DRM by default. But at least it's easy to switch yourself on recent kernels by booting with radeon.si_support=0 radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1.