@eXtremal.ik71

Is there any way to completely disable any interaction of xpmclient with AMD WattMan? As we see, even if value of "powertune" parameter is set to "-1", it still proceeds interaction with WattMan setting powerlimit value to -1%, instead of changing nothing (as mentioned in comment, value "-1 means don't change", that is correct for else parameters of this section, but not for "powertune" as we have seen).

Previously, with older AMD drivers, this was not a problem.
But now the fact is that recent AMD drivers have a lot of new problems, on some PCs interaction of 3-rd party software with WattMan causes improper functioning of the driver that eventually ends up with driver crash, and in some cases - OS crash.

If PC is used for running xpmclient solely, then no any issues occur (though the problem is there, and we can see this if to run AMD control panel and open WattMan tab - driver will get crashed, and in about 3 of 5 cases OS will also get crashed several seconds later).
But in case if PC is also being used for another tasks, this becomes a problem. Attempt to launch any another software that utilizes GPU, especially simultaneously with xpmclient being running, often ends up with driver or OS crash.

On those PCs where we down-graded AMD drivers to versions of 2018 this problem disappeared. But older drivers have lack of some options and have another common issues, so users prefer to use recent drivers versions.

There is also another interesting fact - that problem with driver remains until OS restart even if xpmclient application has been already closed. This indicates that interaction of xpmclient with WattMan causes some sort of corruption to driver that remains until OS restart and causes improper functioning of the driver itself and of another software that utilizes GPU.

If xpmclient was not launched after OS restart then no any issues with driver or with any software occur.

So i'd suggest for the new xpmclient build to add an option that would allow to control whether interaction with WattMan is enabled or is completely disabled.


These issues were confirmed to occur with driver version v19.5.1.
I'm gonna check this with v19.5.2 as well next days, and will add one more comment for that.