isnt optimus just a crappy solution to the performance hit caused by compositing ?
Linux has an opportunity here to beat the other OSes to the punch and deliver on an actually sane API (as an EGL extension or a custom API in Wayland/GLX) that allows apps to indicate whether they'd prefer high-performance or low-power. Hell, it might even go so far as to add some OpenGL extensions to make having the context invalidated for a forced graphics switch to actually work. Which is better anyway for things like hibernate; much better to just wipe the context away and expect the app to reinitialize it after wakeup, especially for a game with potentially 1+GB of textures and buffers and whatnot for modern graphics/hardware.
We could even have profiles like cpufreq ... performance (discrete)/powersave(integrated)/ondemand(workload based? some cards have performance counters? dunno how reliable is that, but should be easy to pick one counter of any kind - temp included? - and customize ranges to switch profiles )
That would be SO AWESOME.
Regards.
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