Hey Dave,
On Thu, 2016-03-10 at 09:30 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: <snip>
Okay so I'm not sure you are heading in the best direction here.
My first suggestion is to stop using the MBP, start using the Lenovo. At least from a Fedora perspective, that is the hw we have more installs of and care more about.
The Lenovo has an NVidia GPU, and there's no runtime PM support for nouveau.
Apple HW is not the same as PC hw in this case and we aren't going to achieve the same level of integration that OSX has, not without some serious rewrites of mutter and the whole X stack.
That's not the target goals. Did you read the wiki page I pointed to listing the goals?
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/DualGPU
You shouldn't be caring about the MUX.
I never talked about the MUX, didn't plan on using it either.
<snip>
So I'm missing what the overall goal here is. To provide better support for dual-gpu laptops and hotpluggable USB devices in the DE?
Just dual-GPU devices for now.
I'd be interested in supporting USB displays, but I only have proprietary drivers for my USB3 DisplayLink dock, and possibly networked display devices, but the AirTame I have is also still using an undocumented protocol.
Under X, Fedora carries a server patch to autoconfigure providers, we'd need to drop that and have something in the DE notice when a new provider shows up and configures it, perhaps something to allow removal of providers that are already bound (so we could detach a secondary GPU for boxes to passthrough).
I'd rather have that be automated so that Boxes can tell you what is using the 2nd GPU, not requiring any manual intervention.
Then we need something in the DE to allow us to launch or have some app info that would decide to launch certain 3D using apps on the more powerful processor.
That's what I started working on, exporting the fact that 2 GPUs are available through a D-Bus service, which also ensures that we only
However since nouveau doesn't quite reclock most of the secondary GPUs that can often end up not being that much more powerful.
There are supported laptops with Radeon GPUs as well, not sure whether that's more powerful.
We also want reverse prime to work properly, so if you plug in an external monitor to a port connected to the secondary GPU that we can pick it up and configure it just like all the other monitors.
I don't think I have any hardware that works this way.
As for the MBP, if we want to spend time chasing the rainbow of OS X, then we've a lot of work to do. OSX can smoothly switch the compositor from rendering on the intel gpu to the nvidia gpu in a vblank. It's truly seamless. To do that we'd need to a) move to wayland, b) get mutter to be a lot smarter than mutter currently is.
That's not what I'm aiming for right now.
Cheers