[Bug 73338] New: Fan speed in idle at 40% with radeonsi and at 18% with catalyst

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73338

          Priority: medium
            Bug ID: 73338
          Assignee: xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
           Summary: Fan speed in idle at 40% with radeonsi and at 18% with
                    catalyst
        QA Contact: xorg-team at lists.x.org
          Severity: normal
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: All
          Reporter: kamil.paral at gmail.com
          Hardware: Other
            Status: NEW
           Version: unspecified
         Component: Driver/Radeon
           Product: xorg

I have a brand new MSI AMD Radeon R9 270 2G GAMING. When the computer starts
(during POST and grub screen and system boot), its fan is clearly audible - at
40% by my estimate. As soon as I hit a login screen, either in Windows or in
Linux with catalyst driver, the fan becomes _very_ silent (at 18% by my
estimate). But with radeonsi driver, the slowdown never happens - it's spinning
at the original speed of 40% all the time (I guess it would just go up if I
were able to utilize the card to its full potential). This happens regardless
of radeon.dpm=1 presence on the kernel boot command line. I also checked that
the card runs in the lowest power level.

In Windows I use MSI Afterburner software to measure fan speed. It's running at
18% in idle. I can use this software to define my own fan speed profile (a
function of temperature and fan speed) which starts at 40% by default in idle.
I used Catalyst Control Center to manually adjust fan speed to 40% and it
sounds pretty equal to what I hear during PC boot.

So, my theory is that there are two default fan speeds - 40% defined by MSI
(used during computer startup) and 18% defined by catalyst driver (used during
graphics mode initialization). It's probably not 18% hardcoded, but it's
computed from current GPU temperature. MSI has an excellent big fan, therefore
the speed is very low.

My problem with radeonsi is that my computer is quite loud compared to a system
with catalyst (Windows or Linux). Can radeonsi behave the same as catalyst in
this regard - set a reasonable (low) fan speed in idle, instead of keeping some
preset speed used during PC init? I don't know what Catalyst does differently,
but the difference is clearly in the driver. If I replace radeonsi for
catalyst, my computer is suddenly super-silent.

Fedora 20
xorg-x11-drv-ati-7.2.0-3.20131101git3b38701.fc20.x86_64
mesa-dri-drivers-9.2.5-1.20131220.fc20.x86_64
kernel-3.12.6-300.fc20.x86_64
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] Curacao PRO [Radeon R9 270] [1002:6811]

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