You are not logged in.

#1 2011-12-31 17:08:52

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Hi everyone,

This is only my second Arch install that's worked (first was generic USB install) so I'm still getting use to the differences between RHAL based and Ubuntu distro's.

I've installed Gnome and my desktop environment + acpi, net-tools etc because I like information and control (thanks Arch for giving that back!).

I got the CPU to scale using cpufreq and the powernow-k8 profile. Next up was brightness control.

Using mesa and either xf86-video-ati or vesa, not sure how to tell which is loaded since it just says driver "unknown", the hardware brightness buttons and xbrightness worked and acpi saw all 20 levels of brightness. However nothing would actually change the brightness level, it just stayed at 0 (full).

After reading through the forum the Catalyst driver doesn't seem to like Gnome 3 so I added "acpi_osi=Linux backlight=vendor" to my kernel line in grubs menu.lst. That ended up removing all brightness recognition, the hardware buttons now do nothing and acpi doesn't see brightness control.

It's an HP Probook with ATI 6380G x2.

Thanks for your help! I'd really like to see Arch double the battery like over windows like Ubuntu did.

Last edited by Incite-Admins (2012-01-10 22:09:46)

Offline

#2 2012-01-01 14:11:18

dist0rted
Member
Registered: 2011-07-15
Posts: 4

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

I've spent many hours myself working with the xf86-video-ati package/radeon driver.  You may simply need to run the command 'aticonfig --initial', though I can't quite tell what the issue is without more specific information.

Check out https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI (the xf86-video-ati page in the Arch wiki) if you haven't already.  Even after I'd skimmed over it quite a few times, something would go wrong and sure enough there was something on that page I'd missed.

Hope this helps!

Last edited by dist0rted (2012-01-01 14:11:56)

Offline

#3 2012-01-01 19:00:09

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Thanks for the reply dist0rted,

I got stuck on the aticonfig --initial for a while, I don't have the Catalyst driver installed lol.

I went through that wiki page again and got the GPU to clock down which dropped the fan down low enough I can stand it, though passive cooling would be great if someone can tell me how to get that safely.

I have Ubuntu installed on another partition that I can mount but can't seem to boot. I added the following to menu.lst, can someone help me figure out the issue so I can do a lsmod there and see how it's doing the brightness control.

Note: I got the vmlinuz and initrd.img from mounting the drive and looking in the boot/grub folder, but can't find a menu.lst, otherwise I would have copied the entry.

# (2) Ubuntu
title  Ubuntu Linux
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-14-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-14-generic

Edit:

I've now tried a few more things. Iadded acpi_brightness=vendor and =legacy which both removed brightness. However with an unmodified kernel line I acpi seems to beleive it really is changing brightness (I can see the "current_brightness" change) however it's not. And as GDM is loading I can see the backlight dim to level 0 so I know it's got control somehow. Anyone have any ideas how I can figure out how it does that initial dimming?

Thanks everyone for your help! I'm really enjoying Arch so far except for the decreased battery life but it's still par with what it would be with Windows.

Last edited by Incite-Admins (2012-01-02 02:53:41)

Offline

#4 2012-01-03 02:36:53

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

So after a bit of trying I got Ubuntu to load and saved the lsmod|sort output to a file. Then compared it with the one Arch gave me.

There was no differences related to power control or back light (only apparmour and differences like that).

Can anyone help explain why when Gnome loads it dims (or is that artificial software dimming?) but if I use the hardware controls/xbrightness/"echo" to acpi_video0/brightness it says it changes but doesn't?

Is the xf86 driver different then Ubuntu's?

Offline

#5 2012-01-03 15:08:53

MadCat_X
Member
Registered: 2009-10-08
Posts: 189

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

I observed a rather weird problem regarding brightness on a certain Lenovo laptop. Passing acpi_osi="Linux" kernel parameter rendered the Fn-keys to adjust brightness inoperable, but the brightness could still be changed manually with the slider in KDE Powermanagement plasmoid (so the /sys interface was most likely working). Unless this paramater was passed, the brightness and Fn-keys worked, but the screen wouldn't switch on after resuming from suspend. You might want to play around with this parameter too...

BTW unless you have your reasons, you will probably be better off with the Catalyst drivers. To install them, you have to uninstall any opensource drivers and blacklist them. There's a nice Arch Wiki page available, but to sum it up all you have to do is
1) remove xf86-video-ati and ati-dri
2) install Catalyst via pacman
3) add nomodeset kernel parameter
4) blacklist radeon module in /etc/modprobe.d

Offline

#6 2012-01-03 19:16:03

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Thanks MadCat,

I've got a major problem now, but to touch on your comments. I played with the kernel parameters a bit more, acpi_osi=Linux did nothing I could tell and acpi_brightness=vendor completely removed brightness (it didn't even exist in /sys/class/brightness. Folder was empty).

I was trying to avoid Catalyst because it doesn't support Gnome 3 according to the community, but decided to try it and at worse would switch to KDE or XFCE.

To start I removed the xf86 ati driver and ati-dri and built ati-utils (not in pacman anymore, but i found it in AUR), then i realized the header files it grabbed for building catalyst were 3.1.6 and my kernel is 3.1.5 so I did a pacnam -Syyu and installed kernel 3.1.6.

Now my screen is blank, literally off, using both Arch Linux and Fallback, however the machine IS running because it will respond to ctrl+alt+del or logging into root and telinit 6.

Can anyone help me out here?! I've never had to recover from disk or Ubuntu before. Thanks.

Offline

#7 2012-01-04 01:00:08

MadCat_X
Member
Registered: 2009-10-08
Posts: 189

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Wow, I certainly didn't expect that happening. Did you add the "nomodeset" kernel boot parameter? As for the kernel headers, I understand that there is a "catalyst-hook" package which tries to build the driver against whatever kernel you have installed on your system. Also removing any xorg.conf and running "aticonfig --initial" is often suggested.

EDIT: What are the ati-utils for? I was unable to find it in AUR and I don't recall this package being mentioned anywhere in the Wiki, I also don't remember installing it when I had an ATI card. Perhaps you could try to get things working with just plain catalysts and only then install additional tweaks...

Last edited by MadCat_X (2012-01-04 01:06:09)

Offline

#8 2012-01-04 01:16:27

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Neither was I.

It's definitely pre-xorg since it goes blank right after "init", I don't even get to see the boot up.

The entire story is I tried to install catalyst from AUR since it wasn't in the normal repo's. It asked for linux-headers and ati-utils (failed without them). Once I installed those I realized the headers were different and upgraded the system. Then did a makepkg on catalyst, it said done and returned me to command line. Tthen (hard) rebooted itself.

When it came back up I had no screen. If I select Ubuntu it works ok, and arch does load so i could run commands if I had a step-by-step to get a screen back. Do you think doing a aticonfig --initial would work here?

Offline

#9 2012-01-04 02:33:56

MadCat_X
Member
Registered: 2009-10-08
Posts: 189

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

I guess you should follow this section of the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AT … figuration and see if any of that helps

Offline

#10 2012-01-04 21:22:54

konstantin.p
Member
Registered: 2012-01-04
Posts: 9

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Hi, Incite-Admins. I have ProBook with A6-3410 APU (6520G video). And I just want to notice that I have almost the same problems: absolutely no backlight control works for me and blank screen after update to linux 3.1.6.
So I think this (blank screen) is kernel problem. By the way hibernate does not work either (with the same blank screen symptom) even with 3.1.5 (see https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/27572 )

Offline

#11 2012-01-06 02:29:09

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Hi konstantin. Glad I'm not alone, though I wish we were both working properly smile

Mine goes black when it processes the udev. Oddly I had no problem what so ever hibernating or sleeping with 3.1.5, Even in Gnome 3.

Are you using the Catalyst driver or the xf86-video-ati driver?

I'm reinstalling right now. Then I'll update first so we know if it's the 3.1.6 kernel that screws things up. If not I'll add the catalyst driver and if it still works try Gnome or XFCE. I'll report back shortly.

Offline

#12 2012-01-07 05:29:08

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

It's taken a while for me to get the time. But your definitely right, it's the kernel. Sadly the 3.2 kernel in the testing repo doesn't fix things either. I'm going to try sticking to the LTS kernel and see if that works.

Offline

#13 2012-01-08 17:38:02

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Hi konstantin.p

It's a bit or a hassle, but I'm now writing this on my updated laptop and have brightness control. It needs the linux26-lts kernel, XFCE since everyone was right, Gnome 3 support sucks in Catalyst, and the Catalyst-generator.

Only issues now are;
-fan control
-wireless doesn't seem to want to come up even with network manager and wpa supplicant, which worked on gnome3 out of the box

Let me know if you need any help.

Offline

#14 2012-01-20 00:13:38

konstantin.p
Member
Registered: 2012-01-04
Posts: 9

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Sorry for not respond sooner, but I postponed (and forgot) this problem until kernel 3.2 in [core].
But now there are 3.2.1 and problem stil present (blank screen on boot)...
About drivers: I use opensource drivers and actually I do not want to use "old kernel" (since 3.0 will become new lts).
So I will go back to 3.1.5 and patiently wait untill it fixed smile
I will post here when this will happen.

By the way my investigation show that while screen is black everything is working : xorg, dm, etc... And xorg is working on actual screen (laptop monitor, not some other output like display-port), but this monitor was powered off...

Offline

#15 2012-01-20 02:30:24

Incite-Admins
Member
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 21

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

As I said I switched to the Catalyst driver which gave me brightness control and my screen's been fine since kernel 3.1.8...or 9. Eitherway I've got 3.2.1-1 now and it's still working great. so I removed the LTS kernel as well.

I copied the 3.2.0 image and ramfs though, just incase another kernel doesn't want to boot I've got a backup that does.

Offline

#16 2012-01-23 12:52:19

konstantin.p
Member
Registered: 2012-01-04
Posts: 9

Re: Odd AMD/ATI behaviour - full recognition but no control [solved]

Here is the actual bug record for blank screen issue: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41569

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB