Making the discrete AMD GPU the default GPU in a Mux-less setup with an integrated Intel GPU in Mint 18 (Xenial)

[Yu, Qiang]

Hi Ryan,

That's interesting. I also want to do this but in another way:
one modesetting DDX display on iGPU and render on dGPU

Attach the prototype patch and the xorg.conf should be

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "AutoAddGPU" "off"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Intel"
        Driver "modesetting"
        Option "RenderPath" "radeon"
        Option "RenderDriver" "radeonsi"
EndSection

Regards,
Qiang

________________________________________
From: xorg-driver-ati <xorg-driver-ati-bounces at lists.x.org> on behalf of Ryan Ross <lightknight.rr at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 11:49:32 AM
To: xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
Subject: Making the discrete AMD GPU the default GPU in a Mux-less setup with an integrated Intel GPU in Mint 18 (Xenial)

Greetings,

I have a Toshiba Satellite P55T-B5340 that I am attempting to persuade
to boot X using the discrete GPU, and only the discrete GPU. It's been a
lot of fun, because it's muxless (no hardware switch, vgaswitcharoo
seems only to crash it), and the GPU I want to use has no dedicated
outputs (and so, somehow, has to steal them from the integrated GPU,
using magic from what I can tell...). I've attempted to adapt the Nvidia
approach, which sadly only appears to work for glxinfo; attempts to use
"modesetting", screens, and AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration appear to
have no (positive) effect on X, as it really wants this GPU to be hooked
up to some form of output (or it will unload the module). On the upside,
the discrete GPU is quite happy with the 'radeon' driver.

Additional Information:

The iGPU is an Intel HD 4600 Graphics (CPU is a i7-4710HQ).
The dGPU is an AMD/ATI Venus Pro (Radeon HD 8850M / R9 M265X).

Output from xrandr --listproviders is as follows:
Providers: number : 3
Provider 0: id: 0x6d cap: 0x9, Source Output, Sink Offload crtcs: 4
outputs: 4 associated providers: 2 name:Intel
Provider 1: id: 0x45 cap: 0x6, Sink Output, Source Offload crtcs: 6
outputs: 0 associated providers: 2 name:VERDE @ pci:0000:01:00.0
Provider 2: id: 0x45 cap: 0x6, Sink Output, Source Offload crtcs: 6
outputs: 0 associated providers: 2 name:VERDE @ pci:0000:01:00.0

Pages I've  looked at, solutions I've tried:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME
https://www.mankier.com/5/xorg.conf#Outputclass_Section
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/364.15/README/randr14.html

and a search through both Google and this greater mailing list for
'discrete gpu', finding some interesting stuff, but nothing applicable.

Has anyone some magic glitter to spare, or perhaps some working
knowledge of how I might get this beast into the proper configuration?

Many Thanks,
Ryan


_______________________________________________
xorg-driver-ati mailing list
xorg-driver-ati at lists.x.org
https://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-driver-ati
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0001-modesetting-support-render-device-different.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 10684 bytes
Desc: 0001-modesetting-support-render-device-different.patch
URL: <https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-ati/attachments/20160721/2942f4c1/attachment-0001.bin>