Patent ID: 8199155
Filing Date: 2012-06-12
Classification: G06F,G06T,Y02D

Abstract:
1. A method, comprising: booting a system with both of a first hardware graphics processor and a second hardware graphics processor enabled; after the system has booted, receiving a command to disable the second hardware graphics processor by calling a driver application program interface; in response to the receipt of the command, determining that an application has already allocated rendered graphics data a dedicated memory of the second hardware graphics processor, and reconfiguring the allocation of the rendered graphics data without the application aware of the reconfiguring; in response to the determination, unloading a kernel mode driver to halt access by the application to the first hardware graphics processor and the second hardware graphics processor; disabling the second hardware graphics processor in response to the unloading of the kernel mode driver; reloading the kernel mode driver previously unloaded to halt access to the first hardware graphics processor and the second hardware graphics processor, in response to the second hardware graphics processor being disabled; and re-initializing the first hardware graphics processor for resuming operation of the first hardware processor; wherein the second hardware graphics processor is disabled during runtime without rebooting.