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
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