[SOLVED] Heat and video problem in -current with radeon-driver

TobiSGD · 03-27-2012, 07:30 PM

After the latest update in -current I was no longer able to use the proprietary AMD driver for the Radeon HD3200 integrated chip in my laptop, I assume that the driver has problems with the 3.2.13 kernel.
So i used the --uninstall option of AMD's driver installer and reverted back to the free radeon-driver. I use no xorg.conf and the driver loads fine, I can find absolutely no errors in /var/log/messages, Xorg.0.log and the output of glxinfo.

Nonetheless there are issues. When I scroll a page (even text only, like in LQ) fast up and down in Firefox my Conky reports loads up to 50% on both cores in this machine (Athlon QL-66, 2x 2.2GHz) and even when idling I have CPU temperatures about 60°C (normally around 15°C below that value). Power-saving on the CPU is active, both cores are running with 1.1GHz almost all the time (ondemand-governor).

Has anybody a clue what is wrong here? If you need more information I will of course deliver it.

Thanks in advance.

Uzuki · 03-28-2012, 12:27 PM

Maybe this patch can help you installing the latest AMD driver. Also try this link. It's in Indonesian. Just use google translate

san · 03-30-2012, 08:44 AM

i can confirm the +15°c, i always had this problem with the kms-driver on this setup (hd3200 + ql_66; compaq laptop?).

as for the scrolling issue:
Any errors in xorg.0.log or any strange output of glxinfo?
fglrx overwrites some files belonging other packages, like mesa and xorg-server (at least libGl.so and libglx.so).
there should be backup of these files in order to restore them on uninstall, but i'm not sure whether they will not be overwritten once you update the driver, so maybe you have lost the backup and are still running the proprietary libraries. you could try to reinstall mesa and xorg-server.

TobiSGD · 03-30-2012, 09:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by san

i can confirm the +15°c, i always had this problem with the kms-driver on this setup (hd3200 + ql_66; compaq laptop?).

Yes, it is a HP Compaq 615.

Quote:

Any errors in xorg.0.log or any strange output of glxinfo?

No, according to the logs/glxinfo all is working fine.

Quote:

glrx overwrites some files belonging other packages, like mesa and xorg-server (at least libGl.so and libglx.so).
there should be backup of these files in order to restore them on uninstall, but i'm not sure whether they will not be overwritten once you update the driver, so maybe you have lost the backup and are still running the proprietary libraries. you could try to reinstall mesa and xorg-server.

Thanks to the help of some LQ members in this thread I managed to install the proprietary drivers. Temperatures are back to normal, but still high CPU usage on scrolling. May be this is normal and I never noticed? The AMD developers really should have a look at this, also at the high temperatures when running the FOSS drivers.

Any ways, thanks for your help, I mark this as solved.