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Rudanar

Member

From: Nagykovácsi, Hungary

Registered: 2009-11-13

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Hello,

I have an Optimus laptop. I want to set the Nvidia GPU as the primary graphic card, I followed the Optimus Wiki, but eventually KDE/SDDM fails to start.
This seems to be the problem:

xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0
Could not find provider with name NVIDIA-0

The enabled providers with the recommended settings:

xrandr --listproviders
Providers: number : 1
Provider 0: id: 0x44 cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 3 outputs: 2 associated providers: 0 name:modesetting

I have the following hardware:

 lspci -k | grep -A3 -E "VGA|3D"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 0652
        Kernel driver in use: i915
        Kernel modules: i915
--
08:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Dell GeForce 820M
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia
        Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

The nouveau driver is blacklisted, but if I blacklist i915, X obviously does not start.
If I run optirun glxgears, the nvidia card seems to be working. But optirun/bumblbee is not a viable option for me, it has always its issues...

Do you have any suggestions??

Last edited by Rudanar (2020-09-24 09:37:42)

---

Coordinator of the Wesnoth Hungarian Translation Team
http://wesnoth.fsf.hu/
http://www.wesnoth.org

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,728

Re: [SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Remove bumblebee... It's config present in the package will directly conflict with what you are setting up when following the nvidia as primary gpu wiki section, as is mentioned in the notice below the available option listing you should only ever attempt to configure one specific setting.

Should it still not work, post your xorg log.

Last edited by V1del (2020-09-24 07:12:46)

Purgeme

Member

Registered: 2020-03-16

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Try optimus-manager, after getting it running, you can just set the default GPU when you power on to your dGPU.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,728

Re: [SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Optimus manager doesn't do anything the manual way wouldn't do and the manual way ensures you have a basic understanding of the relevant impact the options have.

Rudanar

Member

From: Nagykovácsi, Hungary

Registered: 2009-11-13

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Remove bumblebee... It's config present in the package will directly conflict with what you are setting up when following the nvidia as primary gpu wiki section, as is mentioned in the notice below the available option listing you should only ever attempt to configure one specific setting.

Should it still not work, post your xorg log.

You are damn right! I somehow overlooked this. After removing bumblebee, glxinfo shows only the NVIDIA card working and FPS benchmark is good!
However if I try to blacklist the i915 driver in blacklist.conf, SDDM still fails to launch... But as i915 blacklisting is not really necessary after all, I can live with this.

Thank you for your valuable insight! Marking this solved.

---

Coordinator of the Wesnoth Hungarian Translation Team
http://wesnoth.fsf.hu/
http://www.wesnoth.org

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,728

Re: [SOLVED] Optimus laptop Nvidia as primary GPU

Yes you never want to blacklist i915 in this case. The way Optimus as a technology works is that the display of your screen is actually connected to the intel card. What happens when you set this up via configuration is that the intel card only acts as a relay. The nvidia card receives the draw commands, computes the image and passes the final result to the intel card for display on your screen. For that to work properly your intel card has to be active and alive in some way (... if you check with --listproviders the "modesetting" part is actually the intel card that gets used for display)