Showing posts with label nvidia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nvidia. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

LCD panel backlight control vs Sony Vaio AW11Z part 2

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!