[SGVLUG] Dual video cards -- possible/supported?

[juanslayton at dialup4less.com]

Emerson, Tom wrote ..
> I just got an alienware ad in my inbox -- it seems they have a couple of
> models of notebooks that have DUAL video cards -- per the site, one card
> renders "the top half of the display", while the second card manages the
> lower half.
> 
> Is this via a really funky proprietary driver, or (since these are
> nvidia cards I think...) is there an existing linux driver that would
> support this sort of processing?  (I presume there is an inter-card
> connector that passes through "the other half" of the video signal to
> the actual VGA/DVI connector -- that *should* independent of any
> software, but I'll bet a corner or two was cut...)
> 
> I suppose in a truly perfect world, the cards would look like a single
> card/device to the hardware, with one card handling the interface to the
> computer (so the "driver" doesn't have to decide which device to send
> vertex data to in the event the "triangle" the vertices define crosses
> the mid-screen boundary) while the other card managed the
> synchronization of the outputs.  Actually, now that I think about it, it
> has to be this way -- you might send data that technically resides in
> one half of the display, but then perform a transformation "in the card"
> (for scaling, rotation, or whatever) that physically moves the vertex to
> the "other half" of the screen.
> 
> Tom Emerson
> 818-977-8828 

Hi Tom,
   Sounds like a machine that is set up to support one of the multi-head extensions.  Check Xinerama, Backstreet Ruby, or Xephyr, for starters.  Xinerama in particular can spread a screen over two monitors, either side by side, or one over the other.

John

__________________________________________________________________________________

Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense,
Such a dependency of thing on thing,
As e'er I heard in madness.
                         -Measure for Measure