sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Fabrizio Giustina <fgiust@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Martin,
I posted this question before but nobody seems to have really
discovered the change that broke the vga activation on newer kernels.

An interesting finding is that the 2.6.31-11-rt kernel available in
the default ubuntu repository (lucid, also maverick I think) does
work, while probably the stock 2.6.31-11 doesn't (not sure about the
the last, but everywhere I saw notes about booting a <= 2.30 kernel).
I had a quick look at the patches in the rt version, trying to find
out anything related to acpi calls but I couldn't find anything that
ringed a bell... really, I spent no more than half an hour on this, so
my investigation is not so meaningful.

Another thing that may interest you is that in the past there was a
way to trick old vaios by adding a acpi_osi="!Windows 2006" kernel
parameter. This was enough to make the bios switch to the static vga
selection just like for Windows XP. This doesn't work anymore,
probably due to a different way the OS detection has been implemented
in newer bioses, but the point is finding out which parameter the bios
now uses to check for hot switch support (other idea, maybe the
acpi_osi flag is handled differenctly in newer kernels?)

This is a post where I could find the most valuable info about the topic:
http://0xc0dedbad.com/blog/2010/01/30/dual-boot-linux-and-windows-7-on-sony-vaio-z/

HTH
fabrizio



On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Martin <nitram@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi
>
> At some point I remember reading that one person would perhaps try and track
> down the exact kernel commit which
> causes the newer (> ~2.30...) kernels not to work properly. Does anyone know
> if somebody is working on this and would it
> in theory then be possible to reaply the changes to newer kernels and thus
> avoid booting an old kernel first ?
>
> I thought about trying to find that commit myself, if no one is doing it and
> if it's worth tracking down.
>
> -Martin
>
>
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