long time user but not been on the forum much lately. About a week ago I dusted off an old Acer Aspire 17" laptop and installed Mint 20.2 Cinnamon, dual booting with the original Win7 install.
Besides a few minor issues with brightness control (easily fixed with a bit of googling around and command line work), all is in working order.
Where I got stumped is with trying to get the laptop to use the AMD HD7670M card instead of the integrated Intel one. The BIOS has only two options, "Integrated" and "Switchable", so from there I cannot force Mint to "see" only the AMD card.
My plan for the laptop is to use it for coding in Python. It is an old machine, but the big screen, full size keyboard and num pad makes it almost a desktop replacement. Performance is excellent with the integrated Intel card (not tried any gaming though), but it seems a shame to have a dedicated card with 1GB of video memory laying there unused I did my best to do my homework before posting, searching the forum, but:
- Found only two threads mentioning the HD7670 and the information there are not relevant to my case.
- I read all of the posts here: viewtopic.php?f=59&t=248059&start=160, but most of them are about Mint 17 through 19 and with only sparse mention of switchable graphics. I am not familiar enough with the differences between Mint 20.2 and previous versions to be able to extrapolate anything useful.
See below for some system info related to the graphic cards.
lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|Display'
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00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915
--
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Thames [Radeon HD 7500M/7600M Series]
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Radeon HD 7670M
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon
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Graphics: Device-1: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Thames [Radeon HD 7500M/7600M Series] driver: radeon v: kernel
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: intel resolution: 1600x900~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2) v: 3.3 Mesa 21.0.3
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Kernel driver in use: pcieport
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel driver in use: mei_me
Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci
Kernel driver in use: lpc_ich
Kernel driver in use: ahci
Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel driver in use: atl1c
Kernel driver in use: ath9k
Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics
but vga_switcheroo seems to have no effect, when I run:
sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
I get:
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0:DIS: :DynOff:0000:01:00.0
1:IGD:+:Pwr:0000:00:02.0
Next, tried what indicated here:
https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo#Hybrid_Graphics
no joy either, I suppose for the same reason the first attempt failed, the muxless hardware configuration. To add some potentially useful information, these are the outputs I get:
xrandr --listproviders
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Providers: number : 1
Provider 0: id: 0x47 cap: 0x9, Source Output, Sink Offload crtcs: 3 outputs: 5 associated providers: 0 name:Intel
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Could not find provider with name radeon
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string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2)
Last but not least, this thread gave me some hope, as the poster was in a situation similar to mine and with the help of others was able to finally get the discrete AMD card to work:
https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 8&start=20
but even modifying grub as explained, I still can't get xrandr --listproviders to show both cards, so everything else becomes moot.
Any kind soul out there able to help? I apologise for the long post, I tried to anticipate as many questions as possible and to give a clear picture of my system and what Mint 20.2 sees.
I guess the chance that a forum member is using the very same laptop with Mint 20.2 is less than that of being hit by lightning, but I am sure that many of you are WAY better than me with Linux.
Thanks in advance for any guidance more experienced users will be able to provide.