[SOLVED] radeon/radeon dual GPU halp:)

Question

Hey all, I just got a new laptop with radeon/radeon hybrid gpus and I'm a little lost as to how to go about setting anything up. The hybrid wiki only really mentions ati/intel, but I've got both my cards on the radeon driver.
I'm pretty sure arch has both cards going full tilt because the laptop is getting pretty hot and I can change the backlight in /sys/class/backlight/ for either video card and they both change the screen brightness.
I'm also not even sure which card is which;
# lspci |grep -i vga
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Device 9647
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M Series]
I though both cards are 6400m series, the dedicated is a 6470M and I thought I remembered seeing the integrated card as a 6400-series as well on windows when I first got it, but I'm no longer sure.
here they are in lshw
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M Series]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
resources: irq:44 memory:b0000000-bfffffff memory:fea20000-fea3ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fea00000-fea1ffff
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI
physical id: 1
bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=radeon latency=0
resources: irq:41 memory:a0000000-afffffff ioport:f000(size=256) memory:feb00000-feb3ffff
I was thinking of picking one of the cards and writing an xorg.conf to try and disable one and enable the other at x launch, but before I do that does anyone have any words of wisdom or anywhere I should look for guidance? Also is it strange that even with both video cards going on the opensource driver compositing is very slow?
EDIT: ok so I've fixed the compiz and I did try a xorg.conf that specifies one of the devices; this is over my head though. Is specifying the card in the xorg.conf enough to keep one of the cards idle?
EDIT2: nah both cards are still burning full tilt, lm-sensors has both going ~70-74 degrees like they're crunching my math homework
thanks all.
Last edited by htedrom (2012-05-27 05:09:17)

Answer 1

Hey Pres, thanks for the reply
Yea nothing in the BIOS, and sorry specifying by BusId is what I meant by using xorg.conf, so I do have only one specified, though with both cards on the same driver I am unable to blacklist one of them.
I have looked a bit at the ati wiki for powersaving but it doesn't really seem to matter what I do to the cards in terms of power profile.. switching from profile to dynamic didn't seem to change much, nor did specifying a low power profile for one of them. I'm going to install an opengl game when I get home and see what I can see when switching between profiles, but so far in terms of temperature the power profiles didn't seem to have much effect.
Edit: is trying to put only one of the cards on the prop driver possible/a good idea? Could I then blacklist the open source driver for the dedicated card?
Last edited by htedrom (2012-05-08 19:25:09)