[Solved] Hybrid graphics. Can't use the dedicated card

Question

Hey. I've just installed Arch on a laptop that's got 2 AMD cards. 6520G and 7xxx.
I'm trying to disable the dedicated one, but I don't really know how.
Running xrandr --listproviders only shows one of the cards:
Providers: number : 1
Provider 0: id: 0xXY cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 2 outputs: 3 associated providers: 0 name:radeon
cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
0:IGD:+:Pwr:0000:00:01.0
1:DIS: :Pwr:0000:01:00.0
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD SUMO
It seems that the internal one is running at the moment.
Why is just one of them detected by xrandr?
Using kernel 3.11.1, Gnome 3.8, early KMS; I've also added the "performance tuning" options in my 20-radeon.conf
Edit: Disabled it with echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
I'm still wondering why it was using the internal one by default..
Edit2: Now both are showing up but it's still running on the integrated one though. What if I want to use the dedicated one?
Providers: number : 2
Provider 0: id: 0xXY cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 2 outputs: 3 associated providers: 0 name:radeon
Provider 1: id: 0xYZ cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 6 outputs: 0 associated providers: 0 name:radeon
Edit3: Tried with Prime too. It's still running on the IGP.
The thing is: one card is r600 driven, and the other, radeonsi. The X does restart after running Prime, but still.
Problem solved
It needs manual intervention but it works!
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 3#p1329853
Last edited by archie0 (2013-09-28 14:50:07)

Answer 1

If you want to keep it from using the IGD entirely, you can blacklist the module with a conf file in your /etc/modprobe.d folder.  Like so:
/etc/modprobe.d/no_igd.conf
blacklist r600
Note that this will prevent vga_switcheroo from seeing the card at all.  Vga_switcheroo requires ALL modules to be loaded for graphic devices in order to switch between them.
The other route is to create a customized device entry in your /etc/X11/xorg.d folder to specifically set your graphics device using the module you want.  I don't have a code example of this handy at the moment, but you can look around and are sure to find one.