sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Joël Bourquard <joel.bourquard@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Adam,

This is interesting, so that would mean that the "physical connection" of
the Intel card to the backlight is in fact *not* physical at all, but
instead it's a software situation that results from the BIOS's way of
initializing things ?

In other words: Because of the BIOS itself, the backlight control is always
"connected" to the Intel card, even when booting in static Speed mode ?

It would be really, really great to be able to fix the mapping, so that the
NVIDIA card can then control everything.  I'm pretty damn sure this is just
a matter of getting more exposure (ie: more knowledgable kernel and/or
"Nouveau" developers) about this issue, what do you think ?


On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Adam Hill <sidepipeuk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> > 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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