Isn’t half the point of running Linux that you can shoot yourself in the foot if you want to?
Sure you can delete your Grub or whatever, but generally I don’t think it ever was the goal of Linux to give the user the ability to destroy hardware instead of just having to reinstall.
You may not remember the early days, but a lot of distros used to let you set the hsync (not just vsync) values on your CRT and you could very much blow up your monitor with bad values. The documentation even had a big warning in it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons.
But since Linux 6.7 they’ve begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS.
But since Linux 6.7 and the plan moving forward is to honor this power limit bounding box – matching the behavior of the AMD Radeon Windows driver.
AMD and the Linux Direct Rendering Manager subsystem maintainers have decided this will be the intended behavior to avoid risking any user hardware issues and potential damage – granted, the likelihood for damage is more often on the upper power limit, but still limiting the GPU power use too low can lead to undefined behavior or other hard to diagnose problems.
It was confirmed today in this bug report that: "This has been discussed on the amd-gfx M/L, and the conclusion was that under-powering outside of the bounding box is potentially dangerous and might damage the hardware.
That stems from a lengthy mailing list discussion and confirmation from AMD that this matches the Windows driver behavior and that there is the risk when running outside of the validated power ranges to see undefined behavior and potentially hardware damage.This change is frustrating some AMD Linux users with some graphics cards reportedly having very conservative pre-defined lower power limits and thus no longer being able to run on the lower-end outside of that imposed range even though they could successfully do so on prior kernels.
The original article contains 361 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 32%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
