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!
Showing posts with label sony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sony. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Welcome blog, welcome new toy
Welcome to my blog. I'll mainly post some stuff about (Open)Solaris und a little bit of this and that now and then.
So short before christmas, right in time a new toy arrived. A Sony Vaio AW11Z/B. Quite a nice bit of gear, though a little bit too big. But the AR series models I was going to get wasn't available any more. Since I didn't want anything with less than 1650x1080p display resolution and choise of brand is limited I "had" to go for the AW model.
Unfortunately it comes with Windows Vista preinstalled. That we're about to solve pretty soon :-)
First of all wait a bit until the preloaded Vista is ready to welcome you. Took like 15minutes or so before I was logged in. The notebook comes with a nice collection of software (Adobe Acrobat Distiller, Photoshop Elements etc.). We also might need Vista to watch BluRay discs. So I'm going for a dual boot.
Before we start lets create the recommended recovery dvds (yes there's 3! recovery dvds). Took well over an hour to create these. By the time I was this far I had lunch and my boss was there to take a look at the new toy.
The AW11Z/B comes with two 320GB harddisks. Those will make a nice ZFS mirrored pool. I used Vista's own hard disk and partition manager to shrink the original C: partition down to about 50GB on the first drive. I didn't touch the recovery partition (you never know when you might need it ;-)) That gave me roughly 230GB for the Solaris installation.
So now it's time to boot the Solaris installation dvd (I used SXCE build 103). Choose the text mode install and went for a ZFS root installation. I allocated 30GB to the root pool, the rest will go into homes and stuff.
About 40mins later it's time for the first "real" boot into Solaris.
Everything works just as expected. The first nice surprise is that Wifi works out of the box. (It has a Intel WiFi Link 5100).
For the Marvell Yukon 88E8055 we grab Masayuki Murayama's myk driver and are ready to go on the wired NIC too.
Sound works out of the box as well. Nivida graphics just works too.
Even the built-in webcam just works. All in all a very pleasant and easy thing to do.
Next thing is to create a solaris partition on the second harddisk, create two slices, attach on to the root pool and create a mirrored pool for all the data.
There is also a driver for the SD-Card reader which seems to work (it attached fine). I'll have to test that when I have an SD-Card.
Now everything is ready to put some data on it and install all needed software.
Though a few things remain open at the moment.
Suspend to ram seems to suspend the notebook ok but didn't wake up properly again. I'll have to check that.
The screensaver should switch off the backlight of the display after a while, but didn't.
The key for display brightness don't work so battery runtime is not where I want it to be yet.
The bios is really crippled. All one can change is the time and boot device order. I couldn't even switch off the bootup numlock. That really annoys me and I logged a service request with Sony. So far their support hasn't reacted at all within a day.
When I logged into Opensolaris (I use GDM as display manager) it didn't set the permissions on the sound and webcam device, so I had to fix that manually to have those working as non-root user.
Despite those issues great work from everyone who contributed to (Open)Solaris!
So short before christmas, right in time a new toy arrived. A Sony Vaio AW11Z/B. Quite a nice bit of gear, though a little bit too big. But the AR series models I was going to get wasn't available any more. Since I didn't want anything with less than 1650x1080p display resolution and choise of brand is limited I "had" to go for the AW model.
Unfortunately it comes with Windows Vista preinstalled. That we're about to solve pretty soon :-)
First of all wait a bit until the preloaded Vista is ready to welcome you. Took like 15minutes or so before I was logged in. The notebook comes with a nice collection of software (Adobe Acrobat Distiller, Photoshop Elements etc.). We also might need Vista to watch BluRay discs. So I'm going for a dual boot.
Before we start lets create the recommended recovery dvds (yes there's 3! recovery dvds). Took well over an hour to create these. By the time I was this far I had lunch and my boss was there to take a look at the new toy.
The AW11Z/B comes with two 320GB harddisks. Those will make a nice ZFS mirrored pool. I used Vista's own hard disk and partition manager to shrink the original C: partition down to about 50GB on the first drive. I didn't touch the recovery partition (you never know when you might need it ;-)) That gave me roughly 230GB for the Solaris installation.
So now it's time to boot the Solaris installation dvd (I used SXCE build 103). Choose the text mode install and went for a ZFS root installation. I allocated 30GB to the root pool, the rest will go into homes and stuff.
About 40mins later it's time for the first "real" boot into Solaris.
Everything works just as expected. The first nice surprise is that Wifi works out of the box. (It has a Intel WiFi Link 5100).
For the Marvell Yukon 88E8055 we grab Masayuki Murayama's myk driver and are ready to go on the wired NIC too.
Sound works out of the box as well. Nivida graphics just works too.
Even the built-in webcam just works. All in all a very pleasant and easy thing to do.
Next thing is to create a solaris partition on the second harddisk, create two slices, attach on to the root pool and create a mirrored pool for all the data.
There is also a driver for the SD-Card reader which seems to work (it attached fine). I'll have to test that when I have an SD-Card.
Now everything is ready to put some data on it and install all needed software.
Though a few things remain open at the moment.
Suspend to ram seems to suspend the notebook ok but didn't wake up properly again. I'll have to check that.
The screensaver should switch off the backlight of the display after a while, but didn't.
The key for display brightness don't work so battery runtime is not where I want it to be yet.
The bios is really crippled. All one can change is the time and boot device order. I couldn't even switch off the bootup numlock. That really annoys me and I logged a service request with Sony. So far their support hasn't reacted at all within a day.
When I logged into Opensolaris (I use GDM as display manager) it didn't set the permissions on the sound and webcam device, so I had to fix that manually to have those working as non-root user.
Despite those issues great work from everyone who contributed to (Open)Solaris!
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