Optimus and card switching

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 09:20:58AM -0500, Eric McCorkle wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a laptop with an optimus configuration (haswell i915 + nvidia 
> k1100m).  Unfortunately, haswell i915 support isn't implemented yet, and 
> the bios doesn't allow one of the cards to be disabled.
> 
> I'm curious as to what it would take to get basic card-switching 
> functionality working, just enough to allow X to run on the nvidia card 
> (not looking for a full port of bumblebee or anything).

Optimus nvidia chips do not have display pipeline.  They can only
render into buffers, which are used later by Intel chip.