Fedora 25 switchable graphics Test Day this Thursday, 2016-11-03

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Yep, it's Test Day time again - most likely the final Test Day of the Fedora 25 cycle. This Thursday, 2016-11-03, will be switchable graphics Test Day!

'Switchable graphics' refers to the fairly common current practice of laptops having two graphics adapters, one low-power one for general purpose use, one more powerful one for use with applications that require more oomph (e.g. games or 3D rendering applications). NVIDIA brands this as 'Optimus', and AMD just as 'Switchable Graphics' or 'Dynamic Switchable Graphics'.

There are some enhancements to Fedora's support for such systems in Fedora 25, and part of the Test Day's purpose is to test those enhancements. The other part of the Test Day's purpose is to ensure that support for switchable graphics on Fedora 25 Workstation with Wayland by default is as good as it can be, and that in some cases where we know Wayland support is not sufficient, fallback to X.org works as expected.

If you're not sure whether you have a system with switchable graphics, you can run xrandr --listproviders. If the output from this command lists more than one 'provider', you likely have switchable graphics. If you do, please come along to the Test Day and help us test, if you can spare the time. If you believe your system has switchable graphics, but the command only lists one provider, please come join the Test Day chat on the day - we may be able to investigate and figure out what's going on!

The Test Day page and the test cases are still being revised and tweaked as I write this, but as the week goes along, all the instructions you need to run the tests will be present there. As always, the event will be in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. If you don’t know how to use IRC, you can read these instructions, or just use WebIRC.

Comments

Rafael Reuber wrote on 2016-11-01 09:25:
Awesome! I'm happy to know that Fedora will improve the Switchable Graphics support. This is point were Ubuntu have advantage.
liam wrote on 2016-11-02 02:39:
So, should MacBook users with dual graphics (and a hardware mux) report bugs?
seb wrote on 2016-11-02 13:12:
Excuse me if it's a stupid question: a desktop system with on-board Intel graphics and an NVIDIA card won't be "switchable", correct? There is no way to spirit the nvidia chip's render output to the motherboard-connected screen?
adamw wrote on 2016-11-03 19:30:

I don't actually know the answer to that. You could try the test cases - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_hybridvideo_offload , https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_hybridvideo_desktop_offload - and see what happens. What's the worst that could happen?! :)