Heureka!
Finished. The port of NVClock/SmartDimmer to OpenSolaris is complete. It works nicely on my notebook (and I only crashed it once on the way *g*)
A little reading, browsing source code and learning how to access PCI stuff was... ummm... interesting :-) Thankfully there exists a nice thing called libpciaccess which makes life a lot easier.
NVClock now has a Solaris backend that gives me the ability to control the backlight on my notebook.
For now the source code can be found here
Have a go and try it if you have a notebook with an NVidia graphics card. Please report if you have any issues with the Solaris specific part. Any comments are welcome. But please don't sue me if it blows your box into pieces ;-)
Mind you - smartdimmer and nvclock need to be run as priviledged user to set the registers on the graphics card.
I hope the author of NVClock accepts my patch so OpenSolaris gets supported out of the box.
The really amazing thing is how much battery time the backlight actually sucks. With the 'big' battery runtime went up by 1hour just by dimming from 100% down to 15%. PowerTop reports 40Watts vs 26.5Watts. That is just impressive!
5 comments:
Where did you get libpciaccess? I downloaded a snapshot libpciaccess-7aca9465a61934d57781352f4fcc42b779392cd0.tar.gz and built it, but when I try to use smartdimmer I get:
smartdimmer -s 50
pci devices reach maximum number
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
I have libpciaccess readily installed on my SCXE installation (build 103 and 104). It's delivered by the SUNWpciaccess package. Which OpenSolaris version do you run?
I'm on a recently installed 2008.11 on a MacBook Pro. I couldn't find the SUNWpciaccess package. Guess I'll try SCXE.
I just found out, that libpciaccess isn't in 2008.11 but the latest developer update is supposed to have it. Sorry, I don't have 2008.11 to test it. I'll try to find out when it will be in OpenSolaris 2008.11
Until libpciaccess makes into the next OpenSolaris release, can you test the package from nevada build 105 (http://149.203.91.65/~markgraf/SUNWpciaccess.tar)? Untar and pkgadd it. I hope it works.
Post a Comment