hybrid-graphics-linux team mailing list archive

[lynton reed <lynton.reed@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, just posting my info as a new member,

It seems to me that hybrid graphic card support is still a long way off, but
I can offer to do some testing (with a few pointers).

As an interim measure I would like to find a way to load the nvidia drivers
without disabling the INTEL gpu by setting the BIOS sata compatible mode
which seriously degrades machine disk performance, although the nvidia card
seems to work fine in this state.

I just want to use nvidia and am not too concerned with battery life but
Xorg cannot correctly detect the card when the intel card is also active
ie when lspci is showing both cards.


>From my readings it seems that possible interim solutions might be

1) ASUS update BIOS to supply ability to disable one of the intel or nvidia
.
-- unlikely as ASUS dont support linux, although this would seem a sensible
BIOS feature.
without this users are restricted to an OS that can handle hybrid cards
which i think leaves you a choice of only
 windows 7. I wonder if this has anything to do with vendor reluctance.
After all surely its to their advantage to make
these hybrid card machines work on as many os's as possible, even if it
involves a reboot to switch them.

2) Xorg to support hybrid cards (or at least detect them)
-- this looks like it will never happen as it would involve a core
architectural change.

Here are my test results

lynton@mars:/sys/kernel/debug/acpi$ sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name
[sudo] password for lynton:
UL30VT
lynton@mars:/sys/kernel/debug/acpi$ sudo dmidecode -s system-version
1.0
lynton@mars:/sys/kernel/debug/acpi$ lspci -vnnn | perl -lne 'print if
/^\d+\:.+(\[\S+\:\S+\])/' | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series
Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07) (prog-if 00 [VGA
controller])
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation GT218 [GeForce
G210M] [10de:0a74] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

When testing acpi_call it reports success but both cards are  still  shown
in lspci,
note that the G210M rev changes from a2 to ff after this and that I have
also found that after loading this module I cannot shut down the machine via
KDE gui,  ie i have to shudown -h now from a terminal.


root@mars:/home/lynton/Downloads/acpi_call# ./test_off.sh
Trying \_SB.PCI0.P0P1.VGA._OFF: works!
root@mars:/home/lynton/Downloads/acpi_call# lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset
Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [GeForce G210M]
(rev ff)

+1 for the cause. thanks to all contributing to this

lynton