sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Adam Hill <sidepipeuk@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I read somewhere that the brightness control of the LCD is handled by the
> intel card, regardless of which card is used for the graphics.  With the
> above patch, does this mean brightness control is possible?  And does it
> also work when nvidia is used too?

	Actually, yes it should be possible providing that the machine is not in 
static switching mode, because even when the NVidia card is used, the logic 
functions of the Intel card are still active and visible to ACPI. That is how 
Windows can contril brightness when using NVidia.

	However, the fly in the ointment is that there is also not currently a 
way to use the NVidia card in dynamic switching mode - neither the Nouveau or 
NVidia drivers work with the Intel card visible on the PCI bus. This should be 
possible to get round, but I really haven't had time to investigate because I 
have no real desire to use the NVidia card in Linux myself.

	It seems that the problem is:

NVidia drivers: X detects the Intel card as the primary graphic device and so 
passes the wrong PCI ID... the NVidia drivers try to initialise the Intel card 
and realise that it isn't an NVidia one, and so fail. If you pass a BUSID in 
the config file, a similar thing happens to the Nouveau driver.

Nouveau: It seems here that the driver can't cope with the fact that the Intel 
card was initialised at boot time, and so has its memory mapped etc, whilst 
the NVidia card doesn't. This should, I would imagine, be fixable, but 
certainly not by me :(.

Adam.


 
> -Justin
> 
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