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

[Vincent Cheng]

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:16 AM, Andreas Beckmann <anbe at debian.org> wrote:
> On 2013-08-19 12:06, Vincent Cheng wrote:
>> 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
>
> The renamed module now again properly responds to "modprobe nvidia" and
> lists itself as "nvidia" - so changing the config should not be needed
> any more. Could someone please test this and confirm? I don't have any
> optimus hardware myself, so cannot check this.

vincent at vincent-tlaptop:~$ sudo modprobe nvidia
vincent at vincent-tlaptop:~$ lsmod | grep nvidia
vincent at vincent-tlaptop:~$ sudo modinfo nvidia
ERROR: Module nvidia not found.
vincent at vincent-tlaptop:~$ sudo modinfo nvidia-current
filename:       /lib/modules/3.9-1-vclaptop-amd64/updates/dkms/nvidia-current.ko
alias:          char-major-195-*
version:        325.15
supported:      external
license:        NVIDIA
<snip>

> From what I understood from the bumblebee source, it does call "modprobe
> nvidia" and afterwards checks that a "nvidia" module is loaded.

Is it possible that having nvidia and nvidia-current blacklisted in
/etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf is causing this to fail? A brief chat
with upstream on IRC suggests that having a module blacklisted
prevents it from being loaded via an alias (if I understood it
correctly, that is):

<vincent_c> I thought blacklists only prevent the module from being
automatically loaded? Users can still load blacklisted modules
manually.
<vincent_c> either way, the blacklists was already there before the
nvidia module was renamed in Debian, and it didn't seem to break
anything back then
<amonakov> vincent_c: blacklists may prevent loading aliases
<amonakov> previously the module was called "nvidia", so modprobe nvidia worked
<vincent_c> ah
<amonakov> now it's called nvidia-current, so modprobe would need to
follow nvidia->nvidia-current alias, but nvidia-current is blacklisted

The blacklists are in place because, as far as I understand, nvidia
shouldn't be loaded on startup before the bumblebee daemon is (and
neither nouveau or nvidia are loaded until the user runs a program via
optirun/primusrun; bumblebee is in charge of loading the desired
module).

Regards,
Vincent