Linux Patch Sparks Differing Views Over External Monitor Handling With iGPU vs. dGPU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Patch Sparks Differing Views Over External Monitor Handling With iGPU vs. dGPU

Canonical kernel engineer Kai-Heng Feng posted a patch on Tuesday for capable laptops to switch their external monitor connections to be routed through a laptop's discrete GPU rather than the integrated GPU. With select laptops this can be done with an ACPI call but raises questions among upstream developers rather this change is indeed desirable...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Laptop-Monitor-iGPU-dGPU

[Danny3]

From a privacy point of view, why the fuck I would want everything that is displayed on the screen routed through the proprietary driver, for it to be able to make a copy of everything that is displayed?

But coming from Canonical, which is BFF with Microsoft, makes no surprise.
I wonder if Nvidia is already on board with them and if their proprietary driver already has all the spyware and networking capabilities to send the images home.
I hope this shitty change will not be accepted.

[GreenByte]

Jesus, just make a toggle switch

[birdie]

There's another drama going on but seems like the community hasn't noticed/doesn't care:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/341

216303 – Commit ee7a69aa38d87a3bbced7b8245c732c05ed0c6ec broke legacy frame buffer with NVIDIA
216331 – Kernel 5.18.13 freezes VT display

[reba]

On the Lenovo here the external connectors are also routed through the Nvidia dGPU - so if you want to connect a monitor to expand your workspaces you'll have to switch the dGPU on, which is a kind of shame as it burns power just by being on and for nearly no usage, even when the DE runs on the Zen's iGPU.

[Vorpal]

On the Lenovo here the external connectors are also routed through the Nvidia dGPU - so if you want to connect a monitor to expand your workspaces you'll have to switch the dGPU on, which is a kind of shame as it burns power just by being on and for nearly no usage, even when the DE runs on the Zen's iGPU.

Same on my Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen1 with Intel iGPU. I would love the ability to switch over and run everything off the iGPU. Suspend and resume is so buggy on that thing.

[user1]

216303 – Commit ee7a69aa38d87a3bbced7b8245c732c05ed0c6ec broke legacy frame buffer with NVIDIA

That "we are volunteers, therefore we have the right to break your stuff" argument really makes my blood boil. I recently heard the same argument about future GTK versions and GTK 4 text rendering from Gnome devs. As a user of your software, I don't give an f. I want everything to work properly and I don't care what it takes to fix something.

[birdie]

That "we are volunteers, therefore we have the right to break your stuff" argument really makes my blood boil. I recently heard the same argument about future GTK versions and GTK 4 text rendering from Gnome devs. As a user of your software, I don't give an f. I want everything to work properly and I don't care what it takes to fix something.

The worst thing this kernel commit doesn't fix anything, it actively breaks stuff and the person behind it just doesn't care.

[Britoid]

That "we are volunteers, therefore we have the right to break your stuff" argument really makes my blood boil. I recently heard the same argument about future GTK versions and GTK 4 text rendering from Gnome devs. As a user of your software, I don't give an f. I want everything to work properly and I don't care what it takes to fix something.

Huh? They changed an internal kernel API, which there is no guaranteed stability.

[user1]

Huh? They changed an internal kernel API, which there is no guaranteed stability.

There are some reports that it breaks not just Nvidia.
Btw, at the end, these kind of devs are usually proven wrong after they go into their initial denial mode, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case here as well.