Really appreciate the feedback and detail on your testing procedure. After conversation with others and looking more closely I completely agree with you.
I’ve made the change to PPD to not be so aggressive.
amdgpu: reduce panel_power_saving values (!155) · Merge requests · upower / power-profiles-daemon · GitLab
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Great stuff! Am I correct in assuming we still have to wait for a kernel with this patch included before it actually takes effect?
…that’s right, except you build your own kernel with this patch applied.
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There is discussion about it maybe going to 6.8-rc5, but based on that discussion it’s probably going to push off to 6.9-rc1.
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I’m on a FW 16, not 13, but I’m replying so I get notifications of updates.
You are a gem @Mario_Limonciello, thank you :). Are you active in other linux community forums as well?
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I’ve been relatively active here and in the AMD DRM Gitlab.
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The patches are queued up for 6.9. Anyone who want to do this in advance can backport these patches:
And then use PPD 0.20, which will use the new interface by default.
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I ran some experiments with setting the ABM level as kernel arg. What I observed (from my limited testing) was barely any change in power draw for the display backlight, but significantly worse colors when using ABM level 3. It’s hard to describe, but it looked like the lightness of the light colors was set even higher. This was especially noticeable for the whites, but also all the other colors that are not dark. Anyone else notice this?
The contrast and brightness is changed based on image content. If you compensate by adjusting the brightness manually you’ll not see the savings.
The experience is why PPD only applies 3 on power saver and on battery.
Both of these patches appear to be in the os-build kernel-ark commits from the last couple of days for the kernel-6.9.0-0.rc0.a4145ce1e7bc.11 tag
Ah gotcha, thanks, that explains it. So this doesn’t do anything to lower the minimum brightness?
No it doesn’t. It dynamically adjusts brightness for the content and then adjusts contrast to compensate.
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Nice
But isn’t that very far away from the 6.5 kernel we are all on right now? Or will it skip straight to that in a few months
I need a rough estimate to decide if its worth learning about how to adjust all this stuff thats new to me
If you want cutting edge features, you might be better off just changing distros. I’m assuming you’re on Ubuntu, because Fedora 39 is on 6.7 and 40 will already be on 6.8.
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This is going down as the best advice I ever got so far…
Ubuntu doesn’t even feel officially supported in comparison and really should be listed under community supported
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The contrast and brightness is changed based on image content. If you compensate by adjusting the brightness manually you’ll not see the savings.
This is interesting. I’ve been plagued by an issue for the last few weeks on my AMD Framework where the screen with dramatically change contrast and brightness based on the contents. If I go between a screen with a very light overall hue to one with a dark one, and then back, it is very dramatic and jarring. It’s made using my laptop nearly unbearable!
This is under KDE on Wayland.
I tried to write more here, but Cloudflare keeps blocking my comment insisting that I’m trying to do a SQL injection. Here’s the rest of my comment, just asking for help to understand if ABM could be cause of my issue: ADM framework community comment — paste.sr.ht
If you want to disable abm on newer kernels you can follow the advice in the power profiles daemon readme for panel power savings:
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Thank you so much! That looks to have done the trick.
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oh man, I’ve been wondering what the heck was wrong with my KDE Plasma wayland, why colors started to look so washed out with power save or balance profiles, I had to stay on performance always hahaha now I know why
hey, the good thing about this functionality is that when you get tired of the washed colors, you enable performance mode and then you get to see the whole color gamut, and then you remember what a good panel we have