bumblebee packaging

[Vincent Cheng]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 1:51 AM, Andreas Beckmann <debian at abeckmann.de> wrote:
> On 2013-01-21 10:12, Vincent Cheng wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Aron Xu <happyaron.xu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've made some progress on bumblebee and pushed to pkg-nvidia repo:
>
>> I've made a number of small changes to take into account certain
>> differences between Debian and Ubuntu's packaging of nvidia's
>> proprietary drivers [1][2] and added an udev rule to fix a bug [3].
>
> Nice too see some progress :-)
>
> Are there any problems you encounter with the nvidia driver packaging in
> Debian? Please also test with nvidia-kernel-common and glx-alternative-*
> from experimental (they change the kernel module blacklist handling to
> be controlled with the glx alternatives, a update-initramfs call may be
> needed in addition to update-alternatives, but therefore you can disable
> the blacklist without manually doing rm or dpkg --purge).

I have no problem with bumblebee and the current versions of
nvidia-kernel-common and glx-alternative-{mesa,nvidia} in
experimental; I've been tracking experimental for a while to get the
latest nvidia driver releases anyways.

Regardless of how glx-alternatives handles module blacklisting,
debian/bumblebee.modprobe (installed by bumblebee's packaging as
/etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf) actually blacklists both nouveau and
nvidia, since the discrete nvidia card is powered down when not in use
and bbswitch loads and unloads the desired module on demand (when not
in use, neither module is loaded).

> One of the goals of the current packaging is usability in live systems -
> having all the proprietary drivers co-installable and allow them to be
> installed but deactivated, so that some (yet to be written) utility
> could detect hardware, switch alternatives, and create X config.
> It would be nice if bumblebee would somehow integrate in this.
> (Disclaimer: I don't do anything -live myself.)

I've never tried running bumblebee + nvidia drivers on a live system
before, but I think this should be possible, so long as nouveau can be
unloaded without having to reboot (I suppose since i915 is driving the
on-board graphics card and the display, that this is possible?).

Vincent