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scruffy

Member

Registered: 2018-12-11

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Cannot launch Xorg with discrete NVidia Card on Oryp4

Edit: I must learn to read. NVIDIA Proprietary drivers CAN'T do dynamic switching. Thread "Solved". Next step; Booting with "nouveau" driver.

I've searched the forum but my problem is probably too specific.. Or I'm just really bad at it.. like my English;

The situation: I've got an Oryx Pro (Oryp4) from System76 and, in order to be able to launch Xorg (on any Desktop Environment I tried; Spectrwm, Gnome, KDE, LXDE...), I must shutdown the Discrete NVIDIA Card with this command: echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.0/remove . Then after that xorg launch without error on the Intel integrated card.

Definition of "Active" on my case == NVIDIA card is "Powered" but not used by the system and undetected by nvidia tools. I know it's powered because the fans are running... or it mean nothing ? Let's hope not.

The complication: If I try anything that involve Xorg or lspci while the card is "Active", my system freeze and my only option is to hold the power button.. and I've got no log of what happened when I reboot.

The injure: Pops_OS run as it should with the nvidia Card or the Intel Card. But one must reboot to switch.

The Goal: Be able to use the NVidia Card without having to reboot... and come back to the Archlinux that I loved and cherished for years on my oldy old think pad.

What I tried:
- Specifying the Intel Card in xorg config (and many... many "clause to my case" fix)
- Tried multiple nvidia drivers from the xorg' drivers sections
- Tied multiple wiki pages (Bubblebee and nvidia related)
- Tried System76 aur drivers
- Re-installed between most of the tests to avoid blocking myself.

What I'm asking : Is there any of you that achieved about the same thing who could be benevolent enough to share her/his precious discovery ? I probably just don't get the whole concept of a discrete Card. Maybe it's impossible by design for this laptop.

Last edited by scruffy (2018-12-11 15:44:01)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,431

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot launch Xorg with discrete NVidia Card on Oryp4

Welcome to the boards scruffy.

What were the exact results of these tries? If it's just about getting nvidia in general to work and if this is implemented as it is on Optimus setups, you should follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NV … ing_nvidia

If this runs into any problems, please post exact error messages and the exact files you've adjusted and configured, logs produced etc.

Are you sure that the system freezes entirely? Can you not switch the VT? It also depends on what you had installed, xorg/lspci freezes with nouveau are well known with these chipset, it shouldn't be a problem with nvidia, if in doubt post a dmesg before running into a freezing situation.

Last edited by V1del (2018-12-11 15:31:10)

scruffy

Member

Registered: 2018-12-11

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot launch Xorg with discrete NVidia Card on Oryp4

Thank you V1del. When you try too hard for something sometime we become blind of what's around. On the link you sent me there is a sentence pretty clear that I overlooked the 3 times I check that page: "The proprietary NVIDIA driver does not support dynamic switching like the nouveau driver". However, My system won't boot if the "nouveau" driver is not "blacklisted" in grub.cfg. So, now it's a completely different problem.

I should clause this post and try to boot with the "nouveau" driver.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,431

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot launch Xorg with discrete NVidia Card on Oryp4

You won't be able to boot reliably with nouveau, that chipset is simply too new to have any sensible support. The can't do dynamic switching only refers to being able to power up a graphical application while running the session on the intel card. If you follow the steps outlined in my link, the end result should be that all graphics are rendered with nvidia and being relayed over the intel card, but this setup has to happen during xorg startup, with relevantly outlined configuration.