[ltp] Explore radeon(4) features, especially mergedfb and Metamodes.

[Stefan Schmidt]

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Hello.

The last days i found some time to play around with the settings of the
radeon driver. I focused on two goals here:

1. Improve the handling of an external LCD or beamer via vga. Especially
"hotplug" teh monitor after X is already started. Also ynamically
switching between clone mode and mergedfb pseudo-Xinerama. Of course
with different resolutions. 1400x1050 on the internal LCD and mostly
1280x1024 on the external one.

2. The second problem goes in the same direction but is slightly
different as it uses an external LCD connected via DVI throught a
minidock or a dockingstation.
The main problem here is to dock and undock without restarting X.


So start with one, what do i have?

Thanks to mergedfb and Metamodes i've a pretty nice setup for an
external LCD via vga now. pseuod-Xinerama with different resolution
(MergedNonRectangular) or sliding desktop and clone mode. Also i'm able
to switch between pseudo-Xinerama and clone mode during a running X
session via xrandr. Great.

What is still needed to make me lucky?

- Add second monitor during the X session. (I read in Marius config file
  a comment that this could be possible if i define the frequencies of
  the monitor, so no probing is needed.)

- The MergedNonRectangular option seems not to work for clone mode. And
  1280 on a 1400 screen looks ugly. Does this really not work, or i'm
  just to stupid?

- It would be nice to dynamically change the position of the second
  monitor. At home it's on the left side and at work it's on the right.
  :)


Now to the dock/undock problem.

Normally i should be able to use the stuff above to get a descent
workaround to undock my notebook without restarting X, but i use DVI
throught the dockingstation. Anybody know the exact status of using the
DVI port the same way i use the vga port? Alex?

If i could use the DVI port like the vga port i could use Metamodes and
xrandr to switch form pseudo-Xinerama to clone mode an undock
afterwards.

Last but not least some thanks goes to Jeremy Kerr and Marius Gedminas
for their doc and config files. And of course to Alex Deucher for making
mergedfb inside the radeon driver possible.

http://ozlabs.org/~jk/docs/mergefb/
http://mg.pov.lt/xorg.conf

regards
Stefan Schmidt

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