How to completely shutdown Ati card

Question

I would like to know how do i prevent my Ati card from turning on when i enter on ubuntu 11.10. My bios only lets-me shutdown intel hd card or leave the both on but i want to know if is possbible to completely shutdown without having to access to the bios.( if is possible to turn of without using Vgaswitcheroo even better!)

My system is: Acer 3820tg-- intel core i3 350M, 2.26 Ghz L3, Ati Mobility Radeon HD 5470 up to 2138 MB hyper memory, 13,3" HD LED LCD, 4gb DDR3, SSD corsair 60GB sata 2.

EDIT: I now know what is missing on the answers! What only i had to do was: I edited /etc/rc.local file and added the next lines:

1. sleep 6

2. echo ON > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

3. echo IGD > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
4. echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

And then save the file and restart. It wasn't need to do anything more. It should be possible to use only the intel card now. By the way, i didn't blacklisted the radeon driver because doing it make my ati card wake up. (use it at your own risk. i only tested in my system)

Second edit: For those using this to use the intel card, pay attention because adding the sleep 6 to /etc/rc.local might disable your sound card making ubuntu only show a dummy card in sound settings (i noticed this problem in ubuntu versions after to 12.04.2 hardware stack enabled version). To fix this you need to remove the sleep 6.

Solution 1

You can blacklist its kernel module. You can do that by editing blacklist.conf

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

You should probably add something like this:

blacklist fglrx
blacklist radeon
alias radeon off
alias lbm-radeon off

That will blacklist ATIs proprietary driver (fglrx) as well as its opensource counterpart.

Edit:

Ok, how about using vgaswitcheroo then? Add those lines to your /etc/rc.local file before exit 0:

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

That should work.

Solution 2

I have a HP Pavilion dm4t-1100 (also with ATI 5470) and there is advanced hidden mode in the BIOS with more options. Press A and hold it while entering BIOS (for example if you enter BIOS with F10, press F10 and A at the same time) and you should see more menus.

The advanced mode gives following options for the card: dGPU, iGPU, hybrid.

• Hybrid option powers on both cards, so after booting Linux will be able to access both and vgaswitcheroo is active and before starting X you can switch to which one you want.

• For me, dGPU-only option does not work - the laptop freezes with a black screen and caps lock led flashing and I have to do a power off, after which everything is back to the default setting - Hybrid.

• iGPU-only works and turns off ATI, so after boot lspci no longer shows ATI card - only Intel works and vgaswitcheroo is not started at all (/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo directory does not exist at all).

Solution 3

In order to actually turn off the card you need to have both intel and radeon loaded so that the vgaswitcheroo infrastructure gets initialised, and then you can run

echo OFF | sudo tee /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

which will turn off any GPUs that vgaswitcheroo thinks are unused; in this case, it'll be your Radeon. You'll need to do this each boot; it's not persistent across restarts.

Comments

[Celso]

Nothing. It didn't worked. And if i do " $ lspci | grep VGA " it shows: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 12) 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series]

[Wojciech Zylinski]

Please see an update to my answer.

[Celso]

But should i keep the blacklisted modules and add that commands to the rc.local?

[Celso]

When i blacklist the radeon and fglrx modules, does the system uses another module? because that answer doesnt really turn off the ati card.

[Leder]

In order to blacklist radeon you have to add it to the conf file and then issue the command: sudo update-initramfs -u