Problems related to not being able to use Nvidia 9400 in Macbook Pro

[Gorka Navarrete]

Some of the new Macbooks Pro (I think the 5,x series) are equipped with "dual GPU's", Nvidia 9400 and 9600, the first for low-power consumption/long battery, the second for high performance.

In Lucid the default graphic card used is the 9600 and there is not an obvious or easy way to switch to the Nvidia 9400 (in MacOs you can do that in the Energy Saver preferences menu).

The problems associated to the forced use of the Nvidia 9600 are:

*Lower battery life (<3h with Ubuntu compared to 7 hours with MacOs)
*High temperatures (with Ubuntu, the computer is always a lot hotter)

The battery life problem is a deal breaker when you are on the move.

I expect to be able to select which GPU to use (Nvidia 9400 or 9600).

[Gorka Navarrete (emrys)]

It seems in 2.6.34 kernel there have been some developments regarding the dual GPU support:

From: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChange...c33b89f2128173

"1.10. GPU switching
Some laptops have two GPUs, a low-power and inefficient GPU and a high-power and powerful GPU. Users should be able to switch to one or another at runtime. In this version, Linux adds support for this feature. You need to restart X, though."

Is this true? It is working with dual nVidia GPUs? Any hope of a backport to Lucid?

Anyone on Maverick can give info about the activation of 9400 in 9600/9400 systems?

[Metatech (metatechbe)]

The results of some (unsuccessful) experiments can be found here :
<a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1076879&page=2">Experiments in refit shell to enable 9400M on MBP 5,1</a>

[Gorka Navarrete (emrys)]

I am sorry. This is clearly not a duplicate of #885204. The problem here is not that jockey recommends 2 drivers and 3D breaks. The problem is that we can not use our computer hardware as intended. We cannot access to the low-power graphic card, which drastically reduces battery live and gets the laptop a lot hotter.