Bug#920633: bumblebee: Entry 'Driver=nvidia' not added in bumblebee.conf after bumblebee installation

[Luca Boccassi]

Control: tags -1 wontfix

On Sun, 2019-01-27 at 15:44 -0200, Andreas Christ wrote:
> Package: bumblebee
> Version: 3.2.1-19
> Severity: important
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> I installed bumblebee on a fresh installation of buster on a Dell G3
> 3579 with
> GTX1060 MaxQ following the instructions on https://wiki.debian.org/Bu
> mblebee.
> Before installing bumblebee, I had added i386 architecture.
> 
> Optirun then returned:
> 
> [ 1778.285793] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: Could not
> enable
> discrete graphics card
> [ 1778.285868] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.
> 
> In bumblebee.conf, I had to make the following changes:
> 
> [bumblebeed]
> Driver=nvidia
> 
> [driver-nvidia]
> PMMETHOD=none
> 
> 
> Driver was empty before, and PPMETHOD was set to auto. I am not sure
> if the
> latter setting is needed.
> 
> With these changes, optirun and primusrun work:
> 
> christ at CARTMAN:~$ optirun inxi -G
> Graphics:  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 630 driver: i915 v: kernel
>            Device-2: NVIDIA GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060] driver: nvidia
> v: 390.87
>            Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.3 driver: modesetting
> unloaded:
> fbdev,vesa resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
>            OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 1060 with Max-Q
> Design/PCIe/SSE2 v:
> 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.87
> 
> 
> As I found a lot of reports about problems with bumblebee and tlp, I
> wanted to
> mention that I do not have tlp installed.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Andreas Christ

Hi, this is not really a bug, in that on some newer machines bbswitch
doesn't work, so changing PMMethod from auto to none lets the kernel
handle it (which works on those machines).

Note that you'll probably want to also add:

AlwaysUnloadKernelDriver=true

As that will unload the kmods when optirun exists, allowing the kernel
to turn off the card. Without it, the card will be left on and consume
power even when unused.

Unfortunately there's just no way at the moment to pick the correct
setting. The default is what works on most machines.

Also note that setting the Driver is not really necessary, it's smart
enough to figure out if nouveau or the proprietary stack is running.
It's the PMMethod that was needed in your case.

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-nvidia-devel/attachments/20190128/5f1d1912/attachment.sig>