[Solved] ATI hybrid GPUs causing laptop overheating.

[Rivello]

Hello,

I recently installed Mint 13 in a HP Pavillion DV6, with an ATI HD6550M and an onborad GPU radeon mobility HD4200.

I loved the SO but my laptop was overheating (sometimes to ~90°C). After a lot of research and trying everything possible, including the solutions to the ASPM problem, I found out that the problem was with my GPU. That because when I installed the ATI proprietary drivers, the temperature was from 75°C to 55°C when idle.

The problem is:
My system doesn't work well with these drivers. There is glitches every time I open the menu, and it freezes after I shutdown the system, leaving me no option but hard-shutdown. Also the option to switch from one GPU to another doesnt work well, and it seems that these drivers only supports one of my GPUs.

I don't need the best performance and graphics, the one with the native drivers was good enough for me. I just need something that handle my GPUs without overheating.
Heard of open source ATI drivers, but someone told me that these are the ones natively installed.

Anyone has any advice?

Thank you!

edit:
Solution:
The main problem is that both GPUs were ON even if one of them is not being used. Apparently there is no support for switching between then, so the solution was to turn one off.

Here you can see the active GPUs:

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$ lspci | grep VGA
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS880M [Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Madison [Radeon HD 5000M Series]

To turn off the unused GPU, open rc.local:

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sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

And add the following line before "exit 0":

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echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
exit 0

Save and reboot, your system will startup with the unused GPU off, that's what the (rev ff) means:

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$ lspci | grep VGA
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS880M [Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Madison [Radeon HD 5000M Series] (rev ff)

After that my system cooled down from 75°C to 63°C.

I found out that the ATI proprietary drivers do the same but have a better power management, because after installing the Catalyst 12.4 (compatible with my 4200) the temperature dropped down to ~60°C.
The catalyst wasnt working before because it was somehow affected by the lot of changes I made to the system trying to solve the problem as if it was the ASPM issue.
Note: None of the solutions for the ASPM issue worked here, only causing other prolems instead.

And to finish, I installed the Jupiter applet (for power management), now my temp stays between 55~58°C when idle.
That is acceptable for me compared to 53~56°C in Windows.

[ceratophyllum]

You're lucky that your GPU works at all, even in windows. I got stuck with a mid-2010 macbook pro that (nvidia 330M) that crashes all the time in Mac OS X AND in Linux due to some obscure hardware problem.

I don't need the best performance and graphics, the one with the native drivers was good enough for me. I just need something that handle my GPUs without overheating. Heard of open source ATI drivers, but someone told me that these are the ones natively installed.

Make sure you have nouveau, the open source video driver, selected in "Restricted Drivers." It should be the one installed by default when you installed. It really depends in the particular GPU whether nouveau or the closed source drivers are better. I have a Lenovo Y730 with some kind of nvidia card in it which runs WoW and LOTRO well in wine using the closed source drivers, but locks up once in a while. With the nouveau driver, there are no lockups but the games suck.

[Rivello]

It seems that I solved the problem, the solution in the edit in the original post.

ceratophyllum:
Well, my GPUs works perfectly fine in Windows, even the switching system.
It's sad that ATI doesn't make appropriate drivers for hybrid GPUs in linux.

[mint-me]

i think you forgot to mention installation of vgaswitcheroo...

[Rivello]

You're right, but in my Mint 13 fresh-install with all the updates from the manager, it was already working. I didn't need to install.
Any case, it's warned that you may need to install it.