What should the Tuner learn next?

[MTSistemi]

The Tuner is where the board actually gets configured: presets, CPU frequency and
undervolt, GPU clock and voltage, the governor, VRAM split, Compute Units and CPU cores
live, fan control, and the two "find my max" wizards.

Two things are already planned — a fan curve editor (today it is a single manual
percentage or the automatic curve, nothing in between) and a configurable HUD that
builds itself from the sensors actually present instead of being hard-wired for the BC-250.

Beyond those, what is missing for you? Some directions we have thought about and not
decided:

• Per-game profiles — apply an overclock when a specific game launches, drop back after.
• A power budget slider instead of separate clock and voltage controls: "quiet",
  "balanced", "everything you have", worked out from measurements rather than guesses.
• Logging what actually happened — clocks, temperature and throttling over a session,
  so a "this crashed" report comes with evidence.
• Importing someone else's profile — the silicon database exists; sharing settings that
  worked on a similar chip does not.

If you use the board daily, what do you keep doing by hand that the Tuner should be doing?

[virgiliodomingo1-svg]

Even though I haven't tried Skillfish OS yet. I have to say Garuda has a faulty Gamemode implementation on amd APUs but they claim it's a gaming distro: Garuda Gr460nized Gaming Distro, and they didn't auto install it. I have to put it in power save mode then when it heats up it still slows down then I have to put it performance mode and that's the only time the game mode will kick in but the performance is still not quite the real performance you'd expect.

[MTSistemi]

I do not know Garuda, so I will not comment on their implementation. But two things are worth separating, because it is easy to ask gamemode for something that is not its job.

gamemode does a small, specific thing: it changes the CPU governor, adjusts priorities, and little else. It does not repair a badly chosen power profile, and it does not touch where performance is usually lost on modern AMD laptops — the amd_pstate mode and the ACPI platform profile. If the system starts in a conservative profile, gamemode activates and still changes nothing that matters. Which sounds a lot like what you describe: you switch modes, something eventually happens, but never the thing you asked for.

Since the question was about our Tuner, here is why it exists at all. On the BC-250 the standard files are present and accept writes — power_dpm_force_performance_level is sitting there right now saying auto — and they do not move the GPU clock by a single hertz. The clock belongs to the SMU, and the only thing that shifts it is talking to the SMU. That is a quirk of this particular chip, a salvaged console APU, and not of AMD APUs in general. But it is the reason a purpose-written governor runs here instead of the standard tooling: the standard tooling was pulling a lever that is not connected to anything.

As for what the Tuner should learn next: a fan curve editor is currently top of the list.