acertimeline team mailing list archive

[Alexander Simon <simon_alex@xxxxxx>]

Am Mittwoch 30 September 2009 10:20:10 schrieben Sie:
> Damon Rand wrote:
> > Cool! The key question though, when you switch to Intel graphics does
> > the power consumption drop or is the ati card still on?
> >
> > Have you checked with Powertop?
> 
> Powertop shows the power consumption goes down by some 5 watts.
For me, its even more!
After booting, my Acer consumes over 24Watts, after inserting the module, it 
goes down to about 13Watts. After enabling laptop-mode, SATA-Suspend, USB-
Suspend, WIFI-Suspend, i can reach about 11 Watts, running over 5h.
> 
> > 2009/9/30 Alexander Simon <simon_alex@xxxxxx <mailto:simon_alex@xxxxxx>>
> >     It works perfectly for me, i was even able to switch between both
> >     cards while
> >     running Linux!
> 
> Is this described somewhere, or could you tell us more about how to do
> this? How to switch to ATI without going back to BIOS? Do you switch the
> framebuffer console on the fly as well?
I really really did some dirty hacks. There are four BIOS calls:
- enabling ATI chipset,
- enabling INTEL chipset,
- connecting Panel and VGA to ATI,
- connecting panel and VGA to Intel.
After Enabling ATI and connecting the outputs to it, of course at there's no 
output as the ATI is not initialized. I first had to reset the pci bus, the 
card is the initialized, but then for some reason the kernel can't get the 
cards ROM space. I always get "invalid checksum".
So i read the ROM in discrete mode to a file and patched radeonhd to not ask 
the kernel for the ROM, but instead read from my file. Xorg with radeonhd 
really starts up then, even the ATI was completely deactivated before.
I _know_, this is no real solution, but with this patch i just wanted to proof 
it is working in Linux :).
Maybe it's time to put a web page online with this stuff. sf.net, maybe...
> 
> >     When i have the time, i want to write a kernel module that can
> >     switch between
> >     the cards via /sys interface and a little script that takes care
> > about xorg.conf.
> 
> Sounds like a plan. I was in contact with the developer of acer-wmi, and
> he said he'd rather see this functionality in a separate module as it's
> not specific to Acer. (I also informed him of the "configuration",
> "backup" and "powersave" buttons not working.)
You're right. Sylvain himself wrote this for an Lenovo. Switchable graphics 
was invented by Intel and ATI together. NVIDIA also has something like this, 
but i believe, it is not even called "switchabe graphics".
I also would say, a separate module called "switchable graphics" would be 
needed.
>
> 
> Regards,
> Tuukka
>