Support intel-virtual-output with modesetting
Submitted by mai..@..il.com
Assigned to Xorg Project Team
Description
Many laptops come with Intel graphics and a dedicated GPU that can be switched on on-demand. It's called Optimus. Some laptop makers wire the Displayport, HDMI, etc outputs to the dGPU. As a result, the dGPU needs to be running to use these outputs.
The only way to make Optimus work dynamically on non-Windows OS is to use Bumblebee. With it, X runs on the Intel GPU, and the tool switches on the dGPU and starts a separate X server with the nvidia driver when necessary, then transfers images back to the Intel X server
Displays hooked up to the dGPU's outputs result a sort of reversed situation. xf86-video-intel provides the intel-virtual-output tool, which acts as a display proxy between the X servers and transfers video data to the nvidia X server.
i-v-o won't work when modesetting is used instead of xf86-video-intel. The first problem I ran into is that modesetting does not provide and VIRTUAL outputs like the intel driver does. Can these be added somehow?