Monday, January 5, 2009

LCD panel backlight control vs Sony Vaio AW11Z part 1

As mentioned in an earlier post, the backlight control on the Vaio doesn't work out of the box with OpenSolaris. A lot of googling and reading revealed that the backlight isn't controlled via ACPI but via the NVidia graphics card. A lot of more googling and reading lead me to a nifty little tool called nvclock / smartdimmer. It features a number of options to tweak some settings. One of the options is the brightness level of the panel backlight. Now there was just one problem. OpenSolaris isn't (yet) supported.
A little more reading and digging around the code...
Heureka!
I now have a first version which can dim the backlight of the panel. Still a lot of things hardcoded (only one graphics card, fixed base mem address). Still... it's the first step.

Battery time on the default battery went up by 35mins by dimming from 100% down to 15%.

Off to part two... and make the beast auto-detect the graphics card, fetch the base mem address etc.

As soon as I'm done with that I'll post it here and on the relevant list.

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