Cannot force power_dpm_force_performance_level to high
Submitted by RP
Assigned to Default DRI bug account
Description
Created attachment 124464
Information about the supported gpu states
Linux 4.6.2-1-ARCH #1 (closed) SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 8 08:40:59 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I thought my problem was perhaps a duplicate of https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70654 but I'm pretty sure that this isn't the same problem. The problem I'm having is that I can't set the highest frequency state from my gpu (AMD A8-4500M APU + HD 7640G), in a consistent and persistent way. And this is regardless of whether uvd is enabled or not (as I assume this is enabled automatically and I haven't been running any application that requires it)
In other words I would like to be able to set the dpm level to 'high' so that it stays in the higher frequency state, but I can't set the power_dpm_force_performance variable to anything other than 'auto' and 'low'. I get the following output:
λ echo high | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
high
tee: /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level: Invalid argument
It turns out that after some testing, I have noticed that it's more stable to set 'performance' dpm state and force it to 'low', which leaves the GPU frequency at ~335MHz, than setting it to auto which makes the frequencies jump between modes [335/490/655]MHz depending on the load. I would obviously like to be able to set a single mode and have a constant frequency. If I can set 655MHz permanently that would be ideal.
I've already tried using 'dynpm' and 'profile' modes, but they don't work. I tried a bunch of times, even enabled/disabled some radeon parameters to see if they were somehow conflicting but I wasn't able to succesfully change states a single time. It would permanently stay at 200MHz with either of these two profile modes set. That left me with the single choice of using 'dpm', as it was the only mode that was able to at least change the states.
I was told in IRC that the reason I couldn't set the 'high' value permanently was due to a hardware limitation of Trinity chips. I don't see how this can possibly be true as I can get this same GPU to be consistently at its highest frequency state in Windows 8. So if anything this is a limitation of the driver?
I've attached the kernel info about the available states, the list of radeon parameters and their values in my system, and the output of /proc/cpuinfo. As of now I don't know what else to add so feel free to ask for any additional information, I'll make it available as soon as I can.
Attachment 124464, "Information about the supported gpu states":
radeon-kernel-info.log