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

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)