Arch Linux

SmallAndSimple

Member

Registered: 2015-11-25

Posts: 58

[SOLVED] Bumblebee, bbswitch and disabling discrete graphics

Hello,

I have been working with Bumblebee for a little while now using the nvidia package and it works fine, except for disabling the nvidia graphics card. I use the linux package as kernel, so nothing special there. Bumblebeed.service is enabled and has no complaints whatshowever when starting.

The actual problem is that the Nvidia card never gets disabled automatically. I installed bbswitch and the wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/bu … g_bbswitch) tells me that that is enough. But it is not: the bbswitch module does not even get loaded on boot. If I manually load the thing, i can enable and disable the nvidia graphics card:

# sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<< OFF
tee: /proc/acpi/bbswitch: No such file or directory
OFF
# sudo modprobe bbswitch
# cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch            
0000:01:00.0 ON                                                                                                                                                      
# sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<< OFF
OFF
cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch 
0000:01:00.0 OFF
# sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<< ON 
ON
# cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch            
0000:01:00.0 ON

So there is nothing actually wrong, it seems. Except for the connection between Bumblebee and BBswitch.

The question boils down to: how do I get Bumblebee to turn off my nvidia card unless I am using it?

Last edited by SmallAndSimple (2017-06-23 13:13:41)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Bumblebee, bbswitch and disabling discrete graphics

Is your user in the bumblebee group? What's the output of

groups
systemctl status bumblebeed

SmallAndSimple

Member

Registered: 2015-11-25

Posts: 58

Re: [SOLVED] Bumblebee, bbswitch and disabling discrete graphics

Luckily, this is the newbie corner: I manually disabled the powersaving when debugging another problem with bumblebee.

For anyone facing this problem: check your bumblebee.conf, it might contain:

PMMethod=none

Which tells bumblebee to not do any power saving. Change it to auto or bbswitch.