Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

trion · 2013-09-02 08:07:35

Good morning,

I'm running a HP Pavillon dm3-1010eg laptop with ATI/ATI hybrid graphics.
For perfomance and power saving reasons I use fglrx instead of radeon.

On boot, the integrated (low-perf) GPU is active, and I can't seem to switch to the dedicated one (with or without reboot).

$ lspci | grep VGA
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RS780M [Mobility Radeon HD 3200]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4330/4350/4550] (rev ff)

$ fglrxinfo
display: :0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 
OpenGL version string: 3.3.11672 Compatibility Profile Context

The Catalyst control center (amdcccle) provides an option to switch between GPUs, but when I restart X, the setting is back to low-power GPU (fglrxinfo confirms that nothing changed).
The same happens when I try switching with aticonfig:

$ sudo aticonfig --px-dgpu
PowerXpress: Discrete GPU is selected (High-Performance mode), please restart Xserver(s) for changes to take effect!
$ systemctl restart kdm
$ sudo aticonfig --px-list-active-gpu
PowerXpress: Discrete GPU is active (High-Performance mode).

Again, fglrxinfo shows that the IGPU is active.

This is my xorg.conf: http://pastebin.com/Zg30FVeF
When I try replacing the BusID "PCI:1:5:0" (the IGPUs ID) with "PCI:2:0:0" (the DGPUs ID, see lspci above), X fails to start with "No screens found", as if the adapter did not exist. Here's the Xorg.0.log for the failure: http://pastebin.com/Eq9qQfQr, and for completeness, the Xorg.0.log for a successful run with PCI:1:5:0: http://pastebin.com/0c3qgeDV

Interestingly, there are those two lines in the failure log:

[  3118.284] (WW) PowerXpress feature is not supported on A+A Mux platform. Force to UMA mode.
[  3118.287] (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:5:0) found

After googling, I found that powerxpress should work with muxless platforms, and that mux platforms (like mine should be, according to the log?) provide a BIOS option for switching between GPUs (which mine does not).

The driver I'm using is the legacy fglrx (for Radeon HD 2xxx - 4xxx), to be exact: This version with a patch for newer kernels (some changes in procfs).

I hope there is some kind of solution for this, as the wiki (and any other wiki) did not have one.

Thank you very much in advance.

Last edited by trion (2013-09-10 06:31:34)

clfarron4 · 2013-09-02 14:39:57

How about running one card with the open source Radeon driver, the other with the fglrx driver, and using vga_switcheroo (and maybe bumblebee too)? I'm pretty sure it should work. I'm pretty sure I've seen someone post something like that on the AMD/ATi Bar/Grill thread somewhere.

trion · 2013-09-10 06:23:26

As far as I know, there is no way of modprobing fglrx and radeon at the same time or even switching between these modules without a reboot.

Also, I don't even need online card switching, it's perfectly fine if I have to reboot for that. But at the moment, I cannot get the dedicated GPU to work at all.

cju · 2013-09-10 09:28:48

clfarron4 wrote:

How about running one card with the open source Radeon driver, the other with the fglrx driver

Not possible.

clfarron4 wrote:

and using vga_switcheroo

Works only with radeon, but actually pretty fine on ATI/ATI-combinations. And meanwhile, powersaving w/ radeon is also possible respectively quite effective. Furthermore, you probably might obtain a noticeable performance boost by using the dedicated card, even w/ radeon.

clfarron4 wrote:

and maybe bumblebee too

Afaik, Bumblebee supports only NVIDIA.

trion · 2013-09-10 11:27:16

cju wrote:

Works only with radeon, but actually pretty fine on ATI/ATI-combinations. And meanwhile, powersaving w/ radeon is also possible respectively quite effective. Furthermore, you probably might obtain a noticeable performance boost by using the dedicated card, even w/ radeon.

It does work, but the performance of the dGPU with radeon is worse than the iGPU under fglrx.
Also, judging from the heat it's generating, the power consumption under radeon is ridiculous even with the lowest power profile and a disabled dGPU.

clfarron4 · 2013-09-10 11:53:32

cju wrote:

clfarron4 wrote:
and maybe bumblebee too
Afaik, Bumblebee supports only NVIDIA.

It would seem it does, but not out of the box. Some-one has also written an AUR package or this github setup for it as well, though I don't know how reliable it is.

Last edited by clfarron4 (2013-09-10 11:54:45)

cju · 2013-09-10 11:55:52

trion wrote:

Also, judging from the heat it's generating, the power consumption under radeon is ridiculous even with the lowest power profile and a disabled dGPU.

Well, imho it was worth a shot, though… I don't remember any possibility to disable the IGP via the BIOS on HP laptops, but maybe there is such an option now respectively in your BIOS? (With disabling the IGP, fglrx would be forced to use the DGP.)

clfarron4 wrote:

Some-one has also written an AUR package for it as well, though I don't know how reliable it is.

Oh, interesting, I didn't know that one.

trion · 2013-09-10 12:04:39

cju wrote:

I don't remember any possibility to disable the IGP via the BIOS on HP laptops, but maybe there is such an option now respectively in your BIOS? (With disabling the IGP, fglrx would be forced to use the DGP.

There is no such option, unfortuanely. Take a look at the bottom of the OP.

Espionage724 · 2013-09-12 08:34:06

When you did the initial setup, did you add some adapter=all thing as well? Your xorg.conf shows only one device. With my dual graphics laptop (7660G + 7670M), I have two devices in my xorg.conf (on Ubuntu anyway; haven't tried this on Arch yet).

sudo amdconfig --initial -f --adapter=all

ethan961 · 2013-09-18 06:38:35

You may have better luck than I did, but as far as I can tell, there is no current way to get fglrx working properly on a MUX'd ATI/ATI system. From my understanding, support existed in previous versions of catalyst but was taken out somewhere along the line as they transitioned away from MUX'd systems. I had a laptop with integrated HD4000 series graphics and a dedicated HD5650 and only once (back in January 2013) was I able to get Catalyst to work. Even then, I could only get display output after putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up again. Then a kernel update came along and broke that, and despite my attempts I could not get fglrx to work even after a kernel rollback. I'm not sure what exactly broke, but every few months I would try again with a fresh install, look for news, and hope that someone found a solution. I don't think the legacy split helped things as I would have needed both for a successful PXP setup. I would have been happy with just the dedicated, but could not get that working either. Just a couple weeks ago, after another unsuccessful attempt, I managed to trade out that laptop for a new one with the Richland APU, and while the graphics performance is only slightly better, it is nice to be able to have functional graphics on Linux again.

I think the easiest solution, by far, is to try the latest radeon driver with DPM in 3.11. It should greatly reduce power consumption and gave me acceptable heat levels on my old laptop. I'm a bit of a gamer, so the performance wasn't quite high enough for my usage, but if you don't need 100% of your card's potential, this may work. vga_switcheroo works well with that too. I'm surprised AMD didn't even leave in the MUX support in the legacy driver, that would make life easier. Another thing you could try is using acpi_call to power down the integrated card so that only the discrete card is visible to the system but YMMV, it didn't solve my problems. I don't know how feasible it is, but you could also try to find an older version of the driver that did have A+A MUX support although you'd need to use an ancient disto with packages from that era for compatibility. This was going to be my next course of action, but I was lucky enough to find a buyer for the old laptop before I got to that. Best of luck to you, I definitely feel your pain. AMD left us early dual-graphics us with no options and no way HP would let us choose cards in the BIOS - I don't think I've seen a worse BIOS than this Insyde H2O crap they give us. I think they did update some models to give a BIOS graphics switch, but not nearly enough of them.

Last edited by ethan961 (2013-09-18 06:42:17)

Arch Linux

#1 2013-09-02 08:07:35

Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#2 2013-09-02 14:39:57

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#3 2013-09-10 06:23:26

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#4 2013-09-10 09:28:48

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#5 2013-09-10 11:27:16

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#6 2013-09-10 11:53:32

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#7 2013-09-10 11:55:52

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#8 2013-09-10 12:04:39

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#9 2013-09-12 08:34:06

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

#10 2013-09-18 06:38:35

Re: Switching ATI/ATI hybrid graphics with fglrx

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