hybrid-graphics-linux team mailing list archive

[Eric Appleman <erappleman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Update time!

Hey guys, just figured I'd give a short, bulleted update of everything 
that's going on with muxless Radeon laptops.

* No change in driver support from OEMs or AMD on the Windows side of 
things.

* For Linux, things look much brighter. I've spoken to Alex Deucher of 
AMD's open-source driver team and have learned that AMD's promise of 
Linux support with dGPU OpenGL is not to be taken lightly. fglrx 11.4+ 
does technically support PowerXpress (4.0?), but nobody has documented 
the xorg.conf setup that's probably required to take advantage of this. 
Short of figuring this out, all we'll get is segfaults. Both Alex and 
David Airlie are positive that such work will be mostly an adaptation of 
Bumblebee concepts. These are all short-term solutions. The permanent 
Linux solution is X Hotplugging and Wayland work over the next year or two.

* Over the past month, coordinating the collection of DSDT/SSDT data has 
been vigorous and fruitful. Patterns of hardware access are emerging. 
However, it is time to move to the next phase and get the physical 
hardware in the hands of the developers. Unfortunately, our choices are 
a little limited at the moment: HP dv6-61xx (6470m?/6750m+APU, 
6470m?/6770m+HD3000), some models of the upcoming HP dv4-3xxx 
(6750m+HD3000), some models (E220s?/E420?/E420s/E520) of the new 
ThinkPad Edge series (6630m+HD3000) sold outside of the US, Dell Vostro 
3450/3550 (6630m+HD300).

* Linux support on aforementioned laptops requires relatively recent 
kernels and drivers, even more so with the Llano ones. Display is 
achieved through -intel or -vesa. Radeon card is detected but cannot be 
accessed except for the ACPI calls to turn it off and save power. There 
are a few experienced Linux users with these laptops, one of which runs 
Gentoo, who may still be able to provide useful information.

* fglrx 11.7 is coming soon and I'm hoping for some promising release notes.

With all this said, I open the floor to further comments and ideas.

- Eric