[ltp] ATI driver choice / mergedFB / power management

[David Abrahams]

On my Thinkpad T60p I am currently running fglrx, but I have no
commitment to that.  In particular, I don't care about graphics
performance at all except that I like a snappy UI (well, I like the
OpenGL screensavers too, but that's not really important).

What I do care about:

* Low power use when running on battery (current estimates are that I
  get 3:25 or so when I should be getting around 5 hours as I can
  under XP).

* Not frying my machine.  My GPU is currently hovering around 70
  degrees centigrade, even with aticonfig set to the lowest power
  state.  I think DynamicPM is possible with some of the other
  drivers but not supported by fglrx.

* Dynamic switching into/out of dual-head mode.  Requires MergedFB,
  IIUC.  Which drivers is MergedFB compatible with?  My experiments
  seem to indicate that fglrx doesn't support MergedFB; you have to
  use its own dual-head support instead, which precludes running the
  GPU in the low power state, even if you explicitly disable the 2nd
  monitor with aticonfig.

* Low noise.  I don't know if there's much hope for this one without
  frying the machine, but the fan seems to run continuously around
  3400 RPM.

Aside from fglrx there is the vesa driver (too slow even for me) and
the open source ati driver with three sub-drivers.  However, changing
my "fglrx" to "ati" or "radeon" in my xorg.conf just results in a "No
device found" error, so I can't even experiment with them.  Yes, I
have xserver-xorg-driver-ati installed.  Oh, it looks like the FireGL
5200 isn't supported by the open source drivers.

So it seems I'm stuck with fglrx until such time as someone rescues me
by adding FireGL 5200 support to the xorg/DRI driver.  Any advice on
how to maximize my satisfaction, given the criteria above and my fglrx
constraint, would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com