Bug#717687: bumblebee: cannot activate the discrete nvidia card

[Vincent Cheng]

On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs at debian.org> wrote:
> Package: bumblebee
> Version: 3.2.1-3
> Followup-For: Bug #717687
>
> Vincent,
>
> Now that the 325.xx series drivers are in experimental, what do we do
> with this bug ?
> Also, kernel 3.10 is now is unstable (and testing).
>
> You should increase the severity of this bug because it breaks the
> tool's functionality.

There are actually several different issues affecting (or rather,
having affected) bumblebee in Debian lately (and I've just merged all
the reports into this one), none of which I can directly fix myself,
but all of which have either been fixed or have workarounds:

1) nvidia + linux 3.10 compatibility - fixed for most users as of
src:nvidia-graphics-drivers 325.15-1, no need for 3rd party patches
anymore. However, users with certain laptop models may still have
issues with linux 3.10 + proprietary nvidia kernel module (see [1] for
details). There's nothing I can do about this; it needs to be fixed by
Nvidia themselves.

2) launching a program via optirun/primusrun outputs "extension "GLX"
missing on display ":0.0"." to console - fixed as of
src:glx-alternatives 0.4.0, and was caused (if I understand correctly)
by glx-diversions creating broken symlinks during upgrade from
libgl1-mesa-glx 8.x to the current version in testing/sid, thus
removing the glx alternative entry for mesa (and thus breaking 3d
acceleration on users' primary X display); see #712304 [2]. Andreas
has also filed #720069 to ensure that clean upgrades from mesa 8 to 9
are done from now on.

3) nvidia module in Debian renamed as of 319.32-2 to "nvidia-current"
(to support co-installation of several different versions of the
proprietary driver) - workaround is to edit
/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf and change "KernelDriver=nvidia" to
"KernelDriver=nvidia-current", and then restarting bumblebeed
("service bumblebeed restart"). This is not a change that I'd consider
making as default because it breaks bumblebee for Debian users not on
the latest nvidia driver series (e.g. I'd assume that once the legacy
nvidia 304 series is branched off, that it'll be given a different
module name), and also it'd break bumblebee for Ubuntu users. The most
I can do right now is probably just add an entry about this in
README.Debian.

Hence, the situation isn't ideal but I doubt it's release-critical.
Even if it was, there's not much I can do about it.

Regards,
Vincent

[1] https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/455
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/712304