[ltp] Re: Comparison: rovclock and PowerPlay

[TNKS]

David, Alex, (everybody),

In light of the discussion in this thread, I'm a bit confused about what
fglrx might be doing.

David clearly has ibm_acpi set to translate Fn+F7 keystrokes into ACPI
events and not mess with the video BIOS (he has some acpid scripts that are
hooked to these events and they seem to be active).  

He also mentioned (in another thread, I think) that messing with
the /proc/acpi/ibm/video interface directly causes his CRT to flash, but
nothing more.  He speculated this was because he had fglrx active.  

David, I think you're right.  Can you shut down X and see if
the /proc/acpi/ibm/video interface works for you?  Maybe, just to be safe,
also "modprobe -r fglrx" as well after shutting down X.  I'm curious
if /proc/acpi/ibm/video behaves then (at least for the console).

Also, do we have any speculation as to what fglrx might be doing?  I know
it's pure speculation, but I'm curious none-the-less.  

David, I think you alluded that unmasking Fn+F7 from /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey
disabled fglrx's video toggling?  If that's the case, do we think that
fglrx or atieventd is catching ACPI events and translating them to video
BIOS calls?  Furthermore, these ACPI events are being passed through so
acpid can catch them too (maybe that's a default behavior of the ACPI spec;
I don't know).

I have another question that involves my system.  /proc/acpi/ibm/video just
doesn't work for me, with fglrx active or not.  So I'm assuming that the
interface to video BIOS is incomplete or broken for my system.  Yet somehow
`aticonfig --enable-monitor` is able to do what calls to the video BIOS are
supposed to do.  How is that?  What else might `aticonfig --enable-monitor`
be doing if not calls to the video BIOS?  Alex, you're probably in a nice
position to speculate if you've developed the ati open driver.

Thanks for any help in clearing my these questions I have.

- Sukant