Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel

In continuation of the recent topic about NVIDIA Optimus coming unofficially to Linux, Red Hat's David Airlie has just pushed several patches into drm-next that deal with Optimus. These patches will be part of the DRM pull request to then go into the Linux 2.6.40 kernel once its merge window opens.

The drm-nvidia-switch-fixes branch was merged along with adding a MXM WMI driver and hooking it into the Nouveau ACPI support for the MXM method of MUX switching. Added to the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver was also the Optimux detection code and other work.

This though means that only the "Optimus" laptops using MXM-based MUX switching are supported at this point, such as some Lenovo ThinkPad T410 notebooks. More work is needed for other hybrid graphics variants. This is just another small step towards better notebook hybrid graphics support under Linux. More work is still needed in suspending the second GPU when not in use, etc.

The latest stream of commits to the drm-next tree can be found on the Git web interface.