Asus U41SV hybrid graphics linux -- acpi_call DSDT info

One of the team members posted the DSDT info for a ASUS U41SV laptop. The two calls to turn on/off the card are like this:

                                                    \_SB.PCI0.PEG0.GFX0.DOFF

                                                    \_SB.PCI0.PEG0.GFX0.DON

Code snippet:

        If (LEqual (_T_0, 0x03))

                                        {

                                            And (Local0, 0x03, Local0)

                                            If (LEqual (Local0, 0x01))

                                            {

                                                \_SB.PCI0.PEG0.GFX0.DON ()

                                                Return (0x01)

                                            }

                                            Else

                                            {

                                                If (LEqual (Local0, 0x02))

                                                {

                                                    \_SB.PCI0.PEG0.GFX0.DOFF ()

                                                    Return (0x00)

                                                }

                                                Else

                                                {

                                                    Return (\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.GFX0.DSTA ())

                                                }

                                            }

                                            Return (0x01)

                                        }

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ASUS U36JC from 4 to 7 hours of battery life with linux acpi_call

One of the linux hybrid graphics team members has reported that the ASUS U36JC laptop will go from 4 hours to 7 hours of battery life using acpi_call to switch on/off the nvidia card:

system-version
U36JC
1.0

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0046] h(rev 18) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation GT218 [GeForce 310M] [10de:0a70] (rev ff) (prog-if ff

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Hybrid graphics Linux on Samsung sf310-S03

One of the team members reported that acpi_call works with samsung sf310-S03:

acpi to turn on:

echo _ON $(acpi_call "\_SB.PCI0.P0P2.PEGP._ON")
echo _PS0 $(acpi_call "\_SB.PCI0.P0P2.PEGP._PS0")

acpi to turn off:

echo NVOP $(acpi_call "\_SB.PCI0.P0P2.PEGP._OFF")
echo _PS3 $(acpi_call "\_SB.PCI0.P0P2.PEGP._PS3")

PS0 & PS3 are power state values: PS0 is fully powered and PS3 is powered off.

vsync needs to be disabled or your tests with the intel card will be useless:
$ export vblank_mode=0

Thanks @alphac for your post!

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Linux Dell XPS L501X - switching nvidia off

One of the hybrid-graphics-linux team members has found a way to switch off the nvidia graphics card from the Dell XPS L501X laptop model. Here are the details of the process:

https://lists.launchpad.net/hybrid-graphics-linux/msg00450.html

For more information, join the hybrid-graphics-linux team and reply to the email in the mailing list:

https://lists.launchpad.net/hybrid-graphics-linux/

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Video: Matthew Garrett @ linux.conf.au -- Making laptops work with Linux

Here is the link for a video where Matthew Garrett explains, in truly pessimistic tone, why it was so difficult to get APM, then ACPI, then WMI to work on Linux laptops:

http://linuxconfau.blip.tv/file/4719842/

A lot of what people try to do with hybrid graphics linux is to simply read ACPI tables and figure out what the different calls might do, but this is a process that hasn't been helped by any wisely crafted tools so far.

*By the way, TRP4 is a "transient" receptor protein in Drosophila :-)

 

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Linux Optimus PRIME and GPU hot-switching -- David Airlie -- 20110319

The Google Summer of Code 2011 is upon us, and it's time again to bring back those open-source projects under the Xorg umbrella that will benefit from the keen attention of bright students sll over the world. And everything is good news so far for the linux hybrid graphics project. There is interest in working on improving the Linux support, and David Airlie has given an update about the current status:

[GSOC] greetings

wrt to these two projects,

the PRIME work is currently being redone, I was able to play openarena on an nv50 displaying on an ironlake yesterday afternoon. I'm also hoping Ben can get the nvidia PCOPY engine going. I'm hoping to push the various bits upstream on this effort and at try and figure out how to configure things for users. I'll hopefully write up a design document so people can review the design before I push the code out.

The hot-switch work is a lot more work, we really need to implement ARB_robustness extension in the GL drivers we care about, and then port compositors to use the GLX_create_context API so the composting can handle the GPU switch happening. I've got most of the X server side duplication working but there is a lot of validation of a lot of corner cases to be done before I'd be happy pushing it (in my dynerama branch of my Xserver).

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Testing AMD Catalyst 11.4 pre-release on Linux hybrid graphics

A new version of the Catalyst binary driver has been pre-released:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTI3Mg

This is AMD's closed-source binary driver, nothing to do with vga_switcheroo.

One of the team members has submitted a bug report here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer/+bug/745955

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Linux Nouveau intel/nvidia working with github.com/awilliam module for Asus UL30VT - Asus UL50VT - Asus UL80VT 1 0 - HP dm3 - HP SLIC-MPC - Lenovo T410 2516CTO - Lenovo T410s - Lenovo T510 - Sony Vaio VPCZ136GG - Sony Vaio VPCZ13V9E - Sony VGN-Z51XG - Sony VPCZ12C5E

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Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel @ www.phoronix.com

[Phoronix] Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel

MXM is a laptop graphics card form-factor + interface specification, and David Airlie added an initial stub driver to talk to the MXM WMI interface.

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