Re: [lm-sensors] ATI graphics card temperature -> lm-sensors

[Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede@hhs.nl>]

Thomas wrote:
> Hallo,
> 
> I wonder how difficult it would be to incorporate temperature and
> fanspeed of ATI graphics cards into lm-sensors.
> 
> There is the aticonfig tool which provides the data (and more, like
> clockspeeds, ...):
> aticonfig --adapter=0 --od-gettemperature
> aticonfig --pplib-cmd "get fanspeed 0"
> 
> What would be the best way to do that?
> I guess I could do if I knew where to start :)
> 

aticonfig is part of the proprietary driver, so lets forget about that path, 
besides that we really want to do this as standard in kernel hwmon drivers so 
that existing lm_sensors aware tools will just pick this info up as one 
additional sensor in the system.

I've actually been looking into this, and it should be quite doable. I've 
looked at how to do this for my radeon 9800pro, so your milage may very with 
other cards.

For my 9800 pro there is a standard (and already supported) fintek i2c hwmon IC 
(I don't remember the exact model) on the card. The big problem was that its on 
the radeon multimedia i2c channel, for which no in kernel i2c master ("adapter" 
in kernel / lm_sensor speak) driver exists, now this is fixable by just writing 
such a driver, but the problem is that the X server in some special cases (ATI 
all in wonder hardware) actually uses this i2c channel and thus pokes the 
register of the multimedia i2c controller off the radeon from userspace.

But in comes modesetting, and it comes to the rescue in this case, as 
modesetting completely removes the need and ability for userspace to directly 
poke radeon registers. This has broken all in wonder support, but I'm sure this 
will get fixed eventually and that is a price we will have to pay for progress.

In the hwmon case this is actually really good as now the way is free to add 
multimedia i2c support to the drm driver (and this is something which will be 
needed to fix the all in wonder cards) and once the i2c multimedia channel is 
supported as a normal kernel i2c adapter, lm_sensors should just work, atleast 
for my 9800.

I've discussed this with Dave Airlie during the Linux Plumbers Conference, and 
he agreed that adding support for the multimedia i2c channel to the drm driver 
is the way forward. I've added him to the CC in case he has anything to add.

If you want to look into adding support for hwmon to ati cards, writing 
multimedia i2c channel drm driver code would be the first step. I believe Dave 
Airlied is the person to talk to if you want to do that. I will gladly 
volunteer as a tester for this. (radeon 9800, radeon x1950 pro)

Regards,

Hans

_______________________________________________
lm-sensors mailing list
lm-sensors@lm-sensors.org
http://lists.lm-sensors.org/mailman/listinfo/lm-sensors