NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

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Revision as of 19:20, 17 November 2007 by Ppurka (Talk | contribs) (LCD Backlight Brightness Control on T61/R61)
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NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

The NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M is a mobile video card with a G86 core and either 128 MB or 256 MB graphics memory.

Features

  • Chipset: nVidia Quadro NVS 140M
  • PCI ID:
    • 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0429 (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
      • Subsystem: Lenovo Unknown device 20d8
      • Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 169
      • Memory at d6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
      • Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
      • Memory at d4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
      • I/O ports at 2000 [size=128]
      • Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
      • Capabilities: [68] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
      • Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint IRQ 0
      • Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel
      • Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting
      • Capabilities: [600] Unknown (11)
  • PCI Express 16×
  • 128 or 256 MB video memory

Linux X.Org driver

Default X.Org NVidia driver, called "nv" works.

NVIDIA proprietary driver

Support for Quadro NVS 140M has been introduced in the NVIDIA Linux unified driver version 100.14.09 (released on 8 June 2007). For the latest drivers go to the NVIDIA Unix Drivers page. Note that NVIDIA proprietary drivers do not work with a Xen virtualized kernel.

CUDA

Since it has a G86 core, NVidia CUDA works on this video card, even though not being listed in the CUDA manuals. Running very large problems (like the SDK examples) however might fail by running out of the relatively small graphics memory.

LCD Backlight Brightness Control on T61/R61

To the best of my knowledge, no one has been able to get LCD backlight brightness control to work with this video card on the T61/R61 when using the proprietary driver. However, brightness control works fine when using the vesa driver, so it seems that the problem lies with the Nvidia driver itself.

Mike Kershaw wrote on linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org:
This problem was solved (for me) with the latest IBM bios release,

October 18, bios 1.26, 7KET56WW. In-X brightness works now via the hw

keys and acpi/ibm/brightness.
  • On T61-6459CTO, with bios 1.26, and kernel 2.6.22 patched with thinkpad-acpi-0.18, the hw-keys do not work in X. In fact, the file /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness is missing (probably due to the new thinkpad-acpi), however there is a new file in /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video{0,1}/brightness. I believe it must be a newer kernel (2.6.24?) with a patched acpi video kernel driver which achieves the ability to change brightness in X. Changing brightness from a virtual console (CTRL-ALT-F1) works as usual.
NOTE!
Changing brightness in X (Fn-Home/End) now works with nvidia beta driver 169.04, on T61-6459CTO, bios 1.26, kernel 2.6.22, thinkpad-acpi-0.18. All 15 levels of brightness are supported.
--Ppurka 18:20, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Strangely, if the nvidia module is loaded with the argument NVreg_EnableBrightnessControl=1, one can switch to a virtual console, change the lcd brightness level there, and have that level preserved after switching back to the X session. On a T61, this was tested with the acpi video driver included in the vanilla Linux 2.6.21-6 kernel and on an R61 with OpenSUSE 10.2.