Archived thread 1624138 from Natty Narwhal Testing and Discussion (CLOSED). Markdown source: Natty_Narwhal_Testing_and_Discussion_(CLOSED)/thread_1624138_How_does_(will)_Wayland_cope_with_switchable_graph.md
Hi. A main reason why I don't use Linux on my laptop is very poor support for switchable graphics (PC needs to be rebooted). AFAIK, it is caused by some X server limitations.
Do You perchance know how does (or will) Wayland cope with switchable graphics? (of course, as long as the drivers are open for both integrated and discrete GPUs, which is the case of my laptop)
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 8:53 AM, nerdopolis
<bluescreen_avenger at verizon.net> wrote:
A feature that seems to be in some laptops, and is being worked into the Linux kernel.
Would Wayland ever be able to handle this, when the feature comes into Linux, or would the display server always need to be reset?
Outcome of discussion between Dave, Kristian, Jesse and me while ridding a bus is that we should add a way for wayland to ask its client to redraw their surface using a another EGL driver and that wayland server should be able to handle client reporting failure doing so. Maybe i did get this wrong, feel free to correct me :)
I think to cover all use case Dave presented we should have somethings like this: -wayland provide a list of EGL driver it can texture from (optimus case where we can migrate texture from nvidia to intel) -wayland can ask to it's client to switch GL driver and report if they can switch or not (i think this should happen in 2 step first ask and gather answer from all client if one client says it can't then forbid the switch, otherwise ask to all client to redraw with new driver)
All this wouldn't need restart from wayland.
Cheers, Jerome
Source: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000100.html
So it's planned, the way I see it. Hope they don't abandon their plans. Would love to see a GPU switch with no PC/system reboot :)
Thanks for the info. I guess it could help some other people Googling for this information (searching and exploring mailing lists is a little bit harder)
That would be great, the current state of vga switching on X isn't very usefull, the proprietary drivers like FGLRX and Nvidia doesn't work and the opensource alternatives still have huge performance problems. Hope to see wayland solving this.