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wahi

Member

From: Kanpur India

Registered: 2009-02-02

Posts: 19

Website

brainstorming nvidia optimus

so i had read sometime ago that nvidia has no plans to release optimus on its linux blob driver.
anyways i was thinking that it is probably easy enough to automate `modprobe nvidia' which would basically give us the same functionality.
for example i am really using the nvidia only once in a while when i watch a hd flash video or play an open-gl game.

unfortunately i myself lack almost any knowledge whatsoever of programming, save a little bit of matlab, c and python( but only from a mathematical computational viewpoint) and i have always been putting off learning a little bit of bash and awk for arbitrary reasons most of the time. while i think it does as a whole hamper my effectiveness with linux, but i had not really given it much thought before i started using awesome and i3.

anyways what i was thinking was that all that is really needed is a small daemon that if it notices that chromium is started or nexuiz is(the only two programs i think i am running currently that might benefit from the driver.) then it modprobes nvidia and if it notices that all these processes are down then modprobe -rf nvidia.

i can see the logic and it seems simple enough. but i don't know the syntax.
is this approach feasible? or is there a better way to implement this? can somebody please implement this if it is not very bad an idea?

i have never really tried modprobe -rf nvidia but i just checked on htop and there does seem to be any nvidia related process running right now and i am not using desktop compositioning so i don't see what could go wrong.

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...he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: brainstorming nvidia optimus

It's not nearly as simple as just modprobing nvidia. Not by a long shot. Go here: http://linux-hybrid-graphics.blogspot.com/ <- these people know the most about all this stuff, you can check the mailing list to see how far they've gotten.

wahi

Member

From: Kanpur India

Registered: 2009-02-02

Posts: 19

Website

Re: brainstorming nvidia optimus

thanks for sharing this link.

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...he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...