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I am having some trouble with my Sony Vaio SVE1511W1e laptop. It has an ATI Radeon and the i5 has an IGP (i5 2450m).

I don't often use my GPU, and the IGP would be just enough for most usage I do. Therefore, in order to improve the battery life, I wish to deactivate the GPU and use only the IGP.

The problem is that my BIOS doesnt allow me to do so. But I believe it is possible to deactivate the GPU 'programatically'. I'm running Debian Wheezy on the 3.2.0.4 AMD64 kernel.

The first problem I'm running into is that when I run lspci, my IGP doesnt show up. Could this be because im lacking a kernel module? (I chose a targeted installation).

What are the solutions to deactivating a GPU and using an IGP on a Linux System such as debian?

squelos
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1 Answers1

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vga_switcheroo

As suggested, one way is to use vga_switcheroo. If you don't have it as a module try to install linux-firmware-nonfree and modprobe it with debugfs as well.

With vga_switcheroo loaded, as root, verify the state of the discrete GPU:

cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

and then, try to turn it off:

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

If this method doesn't work you can try to use acpi_call to turn off your discrete video card.

acpi_call

This package is not in the debian wheezy repository, so you've to compile it by yourself

Try to follow this blog post and use the script test_off to try all the methods available and see if it works.

Have a look also to the ArchWiki page, most of the information will works also for Debian.

Delian
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