AMD RADEON 8730M on linux

[Alex Deucher]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 11:53 PM, Hashan Darshana
<hashanabesinghe at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have dell inspiron 3521 i7 with hybrid graphics. I have tried everything
> to stop AMD vga from working all the time. It heats the laptop and drains
> the battery. I tried it on ubuntu 14, linux mint 17 and fedora 20.
>
> I installed catalyst 14.9 and some other 14 versions. And then chose intel.
> But nothing seems to work.
>
> I reinstalled linux many times. Enabled POSIX. I saw in a forum that ubuntu
> 14 includes dynamic drivers for amd and that is why it cannot be disabled.
>
> Sometimes, like in 1 out of 100 boots heating stops.
>
> Do you guys know about this? Please tell me how to fix or include it in your
> next driver version.

I'm not sure about catalyst, but with the open source driver you can
disable the dGPU either mnually via the vgaswitcheroo debugfs
interface (older kernels) or for newer kernels (3.14 or newer I
think), the driver will disable the dGPU automatically when it is not
in use.

If you are still having a problem, please file a bug
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org) and attach your xorg log and dmesg
output.

Alex