The simple things in life

[mjg59]

I've spent a while trying to make GPU switching work more reliably on Apple hardware, and got to the point where my Retina MBP now comes up with X running on Intel regardless of what the firmware wanted to do (test patches here. But in the process I'd introduced an additional GPU switch which added another layer of flicker to the boot process. I spent some time staring at driver code and poking registers trying to figure out how I could let i915 probe EDID from the panel without switching the display over and made no progress at all.

And then I realised that nouveau already has all the information that i915 wants, and maybe we could just have the Switcheroo code hand that over instead of forcing i915 to probe again. Sigh.

Comments

Apologies for the offtopic reply [wireless/b43 related]

[(Anonymous)]

I'm using the MBPR 2012 version, which has a Broadcom wireless device, B4331. The wireless keeps dropping - the thing is useless. I'm using Fedora 20, kernel is 3.14.0-0.rc5.git2.2.fc21.x86_64, and I'm using the b43 driver (in other words, I think I'm doing everything possible for this thing to work).

I think you have the same model laptop which should have the same wireless device... do you have this problem? Or did you have this problem, and manage to work around it? Google reveals very little information; I suspect that's because so few people are using Linux on this model laptop.

Thanks for your help - I love reading your posts, particularly ones that help Apple hardware (why do I have this blasted laptop again?).

Re: Apologies for the offtopic reply [wireless/b43 related]

[mjg59]

b43 has had very little work done to improve support for B4331. Your options are basically either to use the closed driver or get involved in reverse engineering, unfortunately...

I can finally have acceleration!

[(Anonymous)]

_Thank you_. I have an older (late 2011-ish) MacBook Pro, and couldn't get 3D acceleration to work without the system hardlocking on boot (since the system chose the Nvidia card, but the Nvidia driver couldn't do proper acceleration). I hadn't looked into it a lot, but given this post, I would presumably have gotten nowhere. It's always nice to get better hardware support.
Now I just have to wait for right-click functionality on the trackpad...

Re: I can finally have acceleration!

[(Anonymous)]

For right-click functionality, I'd suggest that you contact Peter Hutterer or Hans de Goede. Hans is very active at changing input-related things in the direction of improvement.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks you for this! It might actually get me to use Linux full-time on my laptop (rMBP mid-2012). Looking forward to seeing this upstreamed.

thank you!

[glyf]

Thanks. I actually have a couple of these laptops now, and the hybrid graphics is what's prevented me from even trying to run Linux on them.

What versions of Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint or whatever can we expect this work to show up in?

My Late 2011 MBP 17"

[(Anonymous)]

I've gotten this machine to run Debian stable, using the open source radeon driver, and it's pretty satisfactory. I'm running a 3.11 kernel from backports that I pass a couple things to on the refind boot entry. I'm able to use HDMI and watch 1080p video on an external HDTV, or use a second monitor. I'm running Enlightenment as a desktop environment.

It's been a long haul getting it to this point. I read that the radeon driver had really improved in terms of heat and battery life and it seems to be so.

Being able to switch like Matthew is working towards is the holy grail I guess. But for me switching to radeon has made the machine very effective running Debian. (I used to use the intel graphics card but it would go all black on suspend/resume, which something I really want to be able to do)