Arch Linux

macklenc

Member

Registered: 2014-12-24

Posts: 4

Nvidia Optimus Issues

I have been trying to get this working for quite some time now, and everything I have found online seems to fiz out. The problem is that I am trying to gain access to my second graphics card under Arch, and it is fighting me tooth and nail.

I am currently running on a dell 7000 series with a GeForce GT 750M graphics card. I've installed bbswitch, the nvidia drivers, and bumblebee. The video card can be detected from the lspci command, which outputs:

04:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M] (rev a1)

. But

xrandr --listproviders

results in:

Providers: number : 1
Provider 0: id: 0x46 cap: 0xb, Source Output, Sink Output, Sink Offload crtcs: 4 outputs: 3 associated providers: 0 name:Intel

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

Have you read both of these:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Optimus
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee

Will X not start? If so, what is in the log? Also, do you ONLY have an nVidia card, or is there an Intel card in there as well? What;s the output of "lspci | grep VGA"?

---

Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."

gnunn

Member

Registered: 2013-10-21

Posts: 96

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

I use bumblebee on my optimus laptop and xrandr --listproviders only returns one card, the Intel one, as well which I believe is expected since optimus is wired to the Intel GPU and from an X perspective it's not a discrete standalone GPU.

What happens when you run the following in a terminal:

optirun glxgears -info

You should see the following output at the top before the mass of flags:

GL_RENDERER   = GeForce GTX 860M/PCIe/SSE2
GL_VERSION    = 4.4.0 NVIDIA 343.36
GL_VENDOR     = NVIDIA Corporation

Last edited by gnunn (2014-12-24 15:57:58)

macklenc

Member

Registered: 2014-12-24

Posts: 4

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

Thanks for the replies!

mrunion,

I have read both of those, thanks. I can start X if I use an empty config file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf). But if I try to manually specify a file, either writing it by hand, or letting nvidia-xconfig generate the config file, X will crash, if you'd like, I can create one of these config files and post the output. I definately have both cards, though the Nvidia card doesn't show up as a VGA card, but as a 3D controller (the bumblebee article hints at this "Note: On some systems, the NVIDIA card will show up as "3D Controller" instead of a VGA compatible controller in the lspci output.")
The output of

lspci | grep "VGA\|3D"

is:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
04:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M] (rev a1)

gnunn,

That makes since, I wonder if that's the reason why I've never been able to get this second card working...
The result of

optirun glxgears -info

is:

GL_RENDERER   = GeForce GT 750M/PCIe/SSE2
GL_VERSION    = 4.4.0 NVIDIA 343.36
GL_VENDOR     = NVIDIA Corporation

Though, I would like to point out that the first time I ran this command I got the following output:

[  453.953212] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) systemd-logind: failed to get session: PID 21534 does not belong to any known session

[  453.953240] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

Thank you both for the replies (again)!

gnunn

Member

Registered: 2013-10-21

Posts: 96

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

Since you get the GT 750 it looks like bumblebee is working fine as it should. As you probably already know, to use the Nvidia card you have to run the executable with the optirun (or primusrun) commands otherwise only the Intel GPU is used. The wiki entries that mrunion linked to cover this in detail.

I'm not sure why it failed the first time, what desktop environment are you using?

macklenc

Member

Registered: 2014-12-24

Posts: 4

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

Thanks, I am currently using Cinnamon, however I have also tried Awesome, but bumblebee still has intermittent issues.

gnunn

Member

Registered: 2013-10-21

Posts: 96

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

The wiki addresses the session issue, have you tried their suggested fix?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bu … wn_session

macklenc

Member

Registered: 2014-12-24

Posts: 4

Re: Nvidia Optimus Issues

Thanks again, I did miss that my first time through. I just tried to apply that fix, and no cigar. It still gives the same error message on the first attempt to run the command.