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Re: Project BaconBits status update

 

On 07/11/2011 08:00 AM, Gareth McCumskey wrote:
Currently I have an HP Pavilion dv7 that has duel Intel/ATi cards.
Unfortuantely the 11.6 Catalyst drivers do not even support the ATi card
alone, a 6XXXM model. Every attempt to install drivers results in
aticonfig reporting "Display adapter not found".

Personally I don't need the switching capability, just drivers to make
my 3D card work. Couldn't be bothered with the Intel one as I rarely if
ever use my machine unplugged and then its only for an hour or so at most.

On 11/07/2011 09:36, Eric Appleman wrote:
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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If you have a 60xx, manual switching to -ati/fglrx and 3D support are probably going to be the same thing. However, dv6/dv7 61xx cannot use any Radeon driver by itself.

vga_switcheroo support in the third-party UCC (Ubuntu Control Center) should be enough to switch to the open-source -ati drivers.

Same should go for older muxed PowerXpress notebooks like that have cards like the 5470.

Even if the current switching solutions don't work, a notebook with a mux is 10x easier to solve than a muxless one, Hence why projects like byo_switcheroo came about for custom solutions.

- Eric


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