Arch Linux

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 138

[SOLVED] Can't get nvidia to work on 10 year old laptop

I'm not really a newbee anymore, but I don't seem to be able to get this working.

I have a 10 year old laptop with an intel i7 + gpu and an nvidia GTX 680M gpu.
I was able to install Arch with intel video, it works like a charm.
But games that should work fine, are choppy because the nvidia is not being used.

I tried getting the nvidia to work, I would even be satisfied if the system would run nvidia-only (battery is dead anyway) so that's what I am trying to do now.
I followed the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA and looked through the troubleshooting pages. I used nvidia-470xx driver.
As long as I don't explicitly disable the intel drivers by blacklisting them, Xorg (Gnome/GDM) keeps starting with intel graphics (glxinfo -B shows intel). As soon as I blacklist intel, the screen stays in text mode with a blinking cursor and I can only log in on another TTY to restore things.

The system is dual boot and Windows is able to detect and use the nvidia, so it can work.

It may be important to note that the system uses multiplexing for both gpu's. I remember trying a Linux Mint lots of years ago and both graphics adapters were mixed on the screen resulting in a desktop with weird pixels on it. I don't see that here so I think the nvidia is not sending out anything.
I can't disable a GPU in the BIOS.

$ lspci -k | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK104M [GeForce GTX 680M] (rev a1)

The contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log show no mention of nvidia at all, so if intel is disabled, Xorg doesn't seem to even try to use nvidia.

At some point in the installation steps, I had to run xrandr to set provideroutputsource modesetting to NVIDIA-0. If I try to do that manually, I get "Could not find provider with name modesetting".

I'm getting out of ideas.
Any tips for me?

Last edited by scippie (2022-12-31 08:31:25)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,844

Re: [SOLVED] Can't get nvidia to work on 10 year old laptop

The way these things work normally is that your internal display is driven by the intel GPU regardless so blacklisting intel will expectedly run you into troubles.

Proper "nvidia-only" is only possible if your firmware/BIOS/UEFI has a toggle to disable the integrated graphics card, seeing the age of the system this might still be possible.

If that isn't possible your only options are various forms of PRIME, either the "newer" on demand method or the "pseudo nvidia-only" where you pass everything to the nvidia driver and only use the igpu for dumb rendering of the final result.

The former is described in  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PRIME# … er_offload the latter in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … phics_only

Decide for one of these two approaches and follow the appropriate configuration, if you get stuck post the files and logs of what you are trying to do.

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 138

Re: [SOLVED] Can't get nvidia to work on 10 year old laptop

Omg... I am so sorry. I was really so convinced that prime would not work on this system because it was so old and because it uses a mux, but installing prime and using prime-run immediately worked perfectly.

Thanks!

Last edited by scippie (2022-12-31 08:32:29)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,844

Re: [SOLVED] Can't get nvidia to work on 10 year old laptop

Kepler happens to be just at the cut off point of being old enough to not see actual new driver versions but new enough to have seen preliminary Vulkan and PRIME support