Arch Linux

ranjithshegde

Member

Registered: 2020-12-19

Posts: 4

Bumblebee and Vulkan

Greetings,

Not so novice arch user (although first time in this forum so bear with me), longtime bumblebee (happy) user.

Recently I decided, why not game. Installed steam, some games segfaulted with errors pointing to Vulkan.

As any good archer would do, used the wiki to install and configure vulkan, install the specific bumblebee packages (primus_vk and of course lib32-primus_vk).

when I run pvkrun vulkaninfo I get the following error

ERROR at /build/vulkan-tools/src/Vulkan-Tools-1.2.162/vulkaninfo/vulkaninfo.h:248:vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceFormats2KHR failed with ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

The only time I get a result is if I prepend DISPLAY=:8 to any of the optirun (with any bridge), primusrun or pvkrun.

Of course I cant run steam or any non console apps with DISPLAY=:8. results from duckduckgo on various sites points me to not installing vulkan packages, and just to ensure that's not the case I installed all vulkan-devel and everything that point to vulkan in multilib (bloat I know, but I am at my wits end)

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

Specs:
Arch on zen kernel 5.9.14
intel core-i7 9750H
nVidia RTX 2070, (dkms)455.45.01-1
system is up-to-date

Thank you

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,354

Re: Bumblebee and Vulkan

Don't use bumblebee for this on this new kind of machine.  Remove bumblebee and primus_vk and bbswitch and set up Nvidia's own official PRIME render offload instead: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PR … er_offload

Last edited by V1del (2020-12-19 11:26:21)

ranjithshegde

Member

Registered: 2020-12-19

Posts: 4

Re: Bumblebee and Vulkan

Thanks for your reply!

My first reaction was to switch to prime and do things with prime-run. Which of course it works.
The only reason I keep defaulting to bumblebee is that prime cant power down my nvidia-card entirely. I have tried all things in the wiki and the adjoining links (with udev-rules, tlp, powertop, trying to manually rm_mod nvidia_uvm/nvidia_drm) And I loose about 2-3W more.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,354

Re: Bumblebee and Vulkan

Did you follow https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Lin … ement.html ? That should ensure proper power down on Turing/Kaby Lake level systems.

ranjithshegde

Member

Registered: 2020-12-19

Posts: 4

Re: Bumblebee and Vulkan

Thank you,

Yes I did. The problem is, random things power it on (libglvnd requiring software for example, and I have tried removing Nvidia's libgl conf) and then there is no sure way of powering it down as it's not under my control. I guess a few watts is the cost of maintaining a modern optimus laptop!