sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Adam Hill <sidepipeuk@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Same here, I would be very happy if we could control brightness while
> running on the NVIDIA card.  I don't know exactly what it takes, maybe the
> Intel card needs to be accessible from the PCI bus (since, as I heard, the
> physical brightless control is connected to the Intel card).  As I see it,
> initializing the Intel card without allocating any of its buffers (ie:
> initialize it just enough so we can ask it to set the brightness) might be
> the way to do it.

	I fear that it may be much more complicated than that because as far as I 
know the BIOS initialises the Intel card at boot time regardless of the 
position of the hybrid graphics switch. That means that by the time the Linux 
kernel starts the Intel card already has its BIOS and VRAM mapped in to where 
the NVidia drivers expect their stuff to be.

	The simplest solution overall would be if Sony modified the BIOS to 
initialise the correct card at first boot, but that isn't going to happen 
because Windows doesn't care. So, the two sensible options would seem to be:

1) Unmap the Intel card's resources and map in the NVidia card before the 
NVidia module is loaded.

2) Somehow map both cards in. I'm not sure if this is possible because I don't 
really know much about how video BIOS is accessed - if it is expected to be in 
a particular place in the memory map then this would be impossible.

Adam.

 
> Maybe we could set up a bounty that would go to the one who publishes a
> kernel patch and/or generic shell script and instructions to do it ?  That
> could be nice...
> 
> On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Jordi Augé <jordi@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm a new Vaio Z user, and I've successfully installed Linux as Main OS
> > on a VPCZ11X9/e, after some struggling I've gotten everything working,
> > including hsdpa and graphics switching. My only gripe so far is the
> > inability to control screen brightness when using nvidia graphics.
> > 
> > Any updates on this issue? what changes will be necessary to implement
> > it?
> > 
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