[HP Pavilion] ATI Radeon HD 5650 and vga_switcheroo

Insomnium · 01-09-2011, 12:04 PM

I bought HP Pavilion dv6-3125er. There are two video cards: integrated Intel and discrete ATI Radeon:

Code:

#lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Redwood [HD 5600 Series]

And there's no ability to switch between them in BIOS. That's why I decided to use vga_switcheroo. Here is a manual for my disto (Gentoo ~amd64): link. But there is a problem. I can't install proprietary ATI driver with compiled in kernel DRM. And xf86-video-ati is too slow.

Can you advice me something? I'd like to use fglrx, but there's no way to use switcheroo in this case. And I so need it to switch to ATI card.

//Excuse me for my broken English please. :}

adamk75 · 01-09-2011, 08:28 PM

Unfortunately, I do not believe it's possible.

kkjensen · 06-21-2011, 10:39 AM

I'm in the same boat and have been doing a lot of research and googling.

vgaswitcheroo seems to be the best choice with the open source drivers. The proprietary drivers are supposed to have the switching capability but causes some problems.

The most complete I've seen is a vga_switcheroo based one with a bunch of scripts to facilitate the switching and reporting of which card is active.

http://asusm51ta-with-linux.blogspot...-kernel-2.html

I'm still experimenting myself so I'm sorry I can't provide a complete answer.