WattmanGTK Is A Simple GUI For Radeon Power/Performance Knobs On Linux

Unfortunately nothing has panned out from previous remarks made by AMD about potentially open-sourcing their Qt-based Radeon Settings control panel used on Windows so that it could be ported to Linux. The latest we've heard from AMD is that they aren't officially pursuing a GUI control panel for their Linux graphics driver but leaving it up to the different desktop environments to implement their own driver user-interfaces. One of the new community solutions in the absence of an official Radeon GUI for Linux is WattmanGTK.

The AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI/user-space components offer much of the necessary driver tunables already, they just aren't exposed through a nice GUI panel. WattmanGTK is an unofficial project for trying to offer AMD Wattman-like options on Linux that tap into the existing kernel driver's interfaces.

WattmanGTK is written in Python3 with a GTK3 user-interface to allow for basic viewing/monitoring of the Radeon performance and power states along with working towards the ability to overclock the graphics processor. The overclocking and manual fan controls from the GTK3 interface are being worked on for the future.

This interface depends upon the Linux 4.17 kernel or newer for the necessary interfaces and the amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff module parameter must be set for the necessary PowerPlay feature mask.

Those wishing to checkout the WattmanGTK interface can find it on GitHub. With much of the rest of the Radeon Linux graphics driver stack getting squared away, perhaps in 2019 AMD will revisit the matter of an official driver GUI.