zunzuncito

Last year I upgraded to an AMD RX 7900XTX, mainly to play Alan Wake II. Just like my previous card the XTX has a “Zero RPM” feature: it turns off its fans fully if the junction temperature, the hottest part of the GPU, is below a certain threshold. With the fans off, the GPU relies on its massive heatsink for passive cooling. Even in a very well-ventilated case, however, this will mean that the area around the GPU will heat up considerably. For me the fans turn off at around 55°C; the component closest to the GPU, an NVMe M.2 SSD, will usually slowly heat up to around 48°C whilst idling.

Even under load the SSD never exceeds any temperature threshold, so realistically it should be fine, but I’m simply not happy with the amount of thermal energy sitting around in there if it could be expelled easily by turning on the fans. Worse still, the logic for toggling the fans is not very well thought-out, and in the worst case the fans are on for one minute only to be off for the next one, ad nauseam.

With my previous GPU turning off “Zero RPM” was pretty simple. Using the upp(1) tool you could toggle the feature in the GPU’s so-called PowerPlay tables. It’s a simple job, then, to write a systemd service to turn off “Zero RPM” on system boot.

Sadly this is no longer possible on 7000 series cards as there is no more direct access to the PowerPlay tables. Instead a new framework using sysfs for managing PowerPlay features was introduced. Fan curve controls were added after a while (and a lot of moaning by users), but there was no such knob for the “Zero RPM” feature. A couple of months ago a feature request was opened for it, but nothing much happened on AMD’s side.

Initially hopeful for a reasonably quick resolution, I was getting more and more annoyed after a while by the lack of this seemingly simple toggle, so I finally caved and proceeded to have a look at it myself. The hardest part was getting started with reading amdgpu code. The code base is absolutely massive and I had no real idea where to start. Since fan curve controls already existed I thought it best to find the commit that introduced them. After a quick search I found the relevant commit and had a better understanding of which parts of the code to change.

So, after a while of tweaking and twiddling I had a working prototype and I could finally have my GPU run its fans at all times. I knew a lot of people were also waiting for this feature, so I sent a patch upstream. After some short feedback and the addition of another feature the series was accepted, and is going to be part of the kernel sometime soon.

With the fans now running at all times I can happily report that ambient temperatures have dropped by more than 10°C and the SSD usually does not exceed 40°C when idling. Even better I do feel quite proud to have finally contributed code to the kernel.

For a couple of weeks now I have been using Plasma’s built-in weather report system. It supports various different sources for weather observations and forecasts, one of which is my preferred service, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Once the report location is set up, Plasma displays the current conditions in the tray - clicking on it gives you an overview of the next 7 days.

I’ve been quite pleased with this; a quick glance at the icon tells you everything you need to know and the forecast is only one click away. It even supports DWD’s official warning system. There is one small problem with the tray icon, however. See if you can spot it:

That’s right, I couldn’t have possibly taken this image given this post’s timestamp is before 23:57! Good catch. More importantly, however, the icon is showing the sun when realistically it’s going to be dark outside. This has been annoying me to no end, so a couple of days ago I decided to fix it.

Since Plasma already comes with weather icons suited for night-time use, I really only needed a reliable way to tell when to switch to those. After some spelunking in DWD’s two APIs, I found that the latter contains sunrise and sunset times for its forecast endpoint. The weather report system was already using this endpoint to fetch forecast data, so it was a rather simple lookup of two values in the API and then comparing the current observation time to those.

So, after some preparatory work to make date parsing more robust, I sent a merge request upstream which was promptly approved and merged. Finally I could rest easy after dusk, not having to worry about a sun chasing me around.

There’s some more stuff that could be improved in the DWD backend, like station availability. As far as I can tell, when using the open API, DWD limits access to weather data depending on whether or not they have the full rights to it. The API might therefore simply deny access to a station even though it is listed in in the official index. There’s no way to find out which station is accessible except to try them all. To get around this, the DWD backend uses a very simple heuristic based on the first digit of the station ID, since all stations starting with 0 or 1 seem to work. However, this ignores a number of other, still accessible, stations.

I’m planning to look into this further, hopefully finding a better solution so that users of the DWD backend have access to as many stations as possible.