Nvidia Optimus and Ubuntu

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Hello everyone,

Has anyone had any success getting gpu switching to work correctly in Ubuntu or any other similar Linux environment?

I have installed 'bumblebee' and seem to have Ubuntu running fine on the Intel gpu, but attempting to switch to the Nvidia gpu never seems to work right - it always fails to initialise. I don't have the machine in front of me right now, but when I get home I will edit in the error message that is given.

Has anyone else encountered anything like this?

The machine is a Gigabyte P27k with a GTX 765m and i7-4700mq.

2

did you follow one of the guides or just install the package?

bumblebee requires a service to be enabled 

Other than that your driver might be installed wrong, or old. A safe assumption is to install newest drivers from a repository instead of the ones that come with ubuntu as they are usually outdated

3

Hey g el,

I followed the official bumblebee install guide and obtained my Nvidia drivers with:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

I have also configured the BusID in /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia as per their instructions.

lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D" correctly labels my gpu and its location.

However, if I try to use the optirun command, I get:

[  997.273952] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) No devices detected.

[  997.273982] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

Any advice? I'm pulling my hair out here.

4

Does nvidia show up with lsmod? i think bumblebee loads it  when needed but try to see if there was any error loading it. 

Does xrandr --list-providers show your second card?

5

Just use Manjaro, Sabayon or Mageia, all of those come with preconfigured proprietary graphics drivers and preconfigured nVidia Optimus. Don't waste your time trying to get Ubuntu to run, it's just not worth it.

6

Hey Zoltan,

Thanks for the recommendation. I took a look at those distributions and Sabayon looks pretty good really. I'll try that out.

7

You know how to fix problems!