On 15.01.2009 13:04, Stephane Marchesin wrote: > Basically, we lack : > - documentation on how to switch GPUs at the laptop level (i.e. do > what the bios does at boot when you choose the card in the bios) > - documentation on cold booting the nvidia GPU > - driver support on both sides implementing proper GPU power up/shut down > (we're talking about something big here) I always wondered how this works at the hardware level. How are the chips shut off? I guess for the external chip what you really want to do is cut power completely - is this somehow standardized, can you do that through ACPI? How are the outputs switched - some (external to the graphic chips) multiplexers or what, again controlled by ACPI bios? Isn't power up quite similar to just regular posting of the chip?
> > and if you want to keep your session in between, we lack > - X.Org infrastructure to hand a session from a graphics driver to > another (there are a million of possible problems here) > - drivers supporting said infrastructure > (we're talking about something real huge here) > > IMO all this is not very likely to happen. Yes, keeping the session sounds very complicated (though that's probably what people want, for most it probably wouldn't make a difference between rebooting or just restarting X). For the manual switch, I'm not sure how complicated that really would be - of course lacking documentation would be a problem. > When you buy a laptop on > which you want to run linux, I really suggest you check hardware > compatibility. This is no different than unsupported wifi chips. Well, for WiFi chips there's always the hope it will be supported in the future :-). Roland _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg