Radeon Wattman's "Automan" Being Enabled For Vega On Linux

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there is initial support for Radeon Wattman with the AMDGPU kernel driver and modern Radeon graphics processors. "Automan" is now the latest being worked on for Vega GPUs.

Automan as implied by the name is automatic Wattman handling for Linux. There was already automatic Wattman support via earlier AMDGPU patches for Polaris GPUs and can be enabled via the pp_power_profile_mode sysfs node to auto, but now there are patches for supporting newer Vega graphics processors.

The power features are adjusted/optimized automatically based on activity level of the hardware. This automatic functionality though is disabled when using FreeSync since the aggressive power management behavior can otherwise lead to potentially choppy performance.

Those with Vega GPUs wanting to try out this Automan functionality can find the 10 patches on the AMD mailing list this weekend. There's still enough time that these Vega patches should end up with all of the other Wattman code in Linux 4.17.