Nouveau Working Towards Better MXM, Optimus

Ben Skeggs, the Red Hat employee who has been prolific in contributing towards the Nouveau driver project, is in need of some help from NVIDIA laptop owners. If you have a NVIDIA laptop, even the troublesome Optimus laptops, he has a simple chore for you in order to improve Nouveau's support for MXM.

Skeggs just needs some more data from laptops with MXM, the mobile PCI Express graphics module standard from NVIDIA. MXM (Mobile PCI Express Module) is found on higher-end notebooks from most of the major notebook vendors. In this mailing list message, Ben Skeggs outlines the instructions for checking whether your notebook uses MXM. If it does use MXM, he's looking for i2c and video BIOS dumps from the hardware. Instructions for generating those dumps are also included as part of the email.

Data from a greater range of notebooks will allow him and others to improve the MXM support in Nouveau. This will ultimately help out Optimus support, but there's still work to be done in the X.Org Server and elsewhere for proper GPU switching support.