[OpenIndiana-discuss] GPU driver issues in OpenIndiana 151a and a noisy GPU fan

[Robin Axelsson]

I'm using an ATI Radeon Juniper card (HD5770) and I reported a little 
over a year ago that the screen went black as Xorg starts when using the 
radeon driver on OI 148. The solution was to ditch the radeon driver and 
use the VESA driver in its stead.

Now, when I made a new install of 151a, I used an older monitor 
(analogue VGA) and the situation looks different. After the install I 
have a picture in the old monitor when I boot into the system and access 
to Gnome but when I switch to the new monitor (HDMI) the screen is black 
like it was a year ago.

When I boot with both monitors connected they both are black but when I 
unplug the new monitor and boot with only the old one, the picture comes 
back. So the conclusion is that it seems that the radeon driver actually 
works with 5770 but there are some issues to be cleared out, hopefully 
only configuration issues.

Any clues on how to resolve this would be great.



When I boot into the OpenIndiana, the GPU fan slowly ramps up the speed 
up to max within a few minutes (think slow crescendo but with loud noise 
instead of music). When I boot into Windows, the fan does not behave 
that way. What I have found out is that the fan/temperature profile is 
in the BIOS of the graphics adapter but it needs to be activated by the 
driver of the operating system, probably a bit flag somewhere that needs 
to be flipped. Catalyst (CCC) for Linux should take care of this but 
this is OpenIndiana.

So is there a way to make the driver in OpenIndiana activate this fan 
control as it is quite annoying with having a fan running at full speed 
while the GPU is only consuming 30W of power (yes, I have measured it 
with a multimeter)?

Robin.