NVIDIA Optimus Bumblebee

NVIDIA Optimus is an optimization technology created by NVIDIA which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will transparently and seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system’s graphics rendering hardware. From Bumblebee’s FAQ: Bumblebee is a effort to make NVIDIA Optimus enabled laptops work in GNU/Linux systems. Such feature involves two graphics cards with two different power consumption profiles plugged in a layered way sharing a single framebuffer.

The discrete GPU (NVIDIA) is turned off when not in use and activated and turned on though ACPI calls when demanding OpenGL applications require the extra power the discrete GPU can give.

Demanding OpenGL applications might include such things as 3D games or 3D rendering software but would not include such things as a web browser or a video playback program like mplayer or VLC.

If you have a laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card (usually you can tell by looking for an NVIDIA logo sticker on it), then it might support the Optimus technology. If you don’t have an optimus technology computer nothing in this documentation is relevant to your PC. (Optimus was slated at one point to go in desktop PCs but the industry ended up rejecting that concept…)

And one is a Intel Integrated Graphics Controller and the other is a NVIDIA Corporation chip, then you probably have an optimus notebook.

To further verify, if you have the two VGA devices with one as Intel Integrated and other as NVIDIA, as root look for the /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch file. If it exists, then you have an optimus PC. If its missing, then you might not. (It might be that you have a card that nouveau can’t use yet because it is too new…)

Most users will want to turn off Secure boot in the BIOS or UEFI screen when you need nvidia drivers or bbswitch-dkms. If you want to make your own public / private keys for kernel module signing you can look here or here for more information on the subject. If you end up doing that and use the closed source NVIDIA driver, you will need to edit the /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee-nvidia-sign.conf file.

Next, run dnf update before you begin. And just to be safe, reboot your PC so that you are booted into the newest kernel. The reason for this is that you want the kernel-devel package to match the kernel you are running under. If you don’t reboot after a dnf update these versions may differ which will cause compiling problems.

Finally, reboot and bumblebee should be ready to go.

In general, using the Primus bridge gives better performance then using the default VirtualGL bridge. In Bumblebee 4.0 (coming soon) Primus will become the default bridge and VirtuaGL will need to be called explicitly if you still want it. Also beginning with bumblebee 4.0 (coming soon) the VirtuaGL dependency will be replaced with a Primus dependency instead. So you might not even have VirtuaGL installed by default in the future.

For Primus, there is a separate shell script you can use to invoke it called primusrun.

It may become tedious to always use the optirun program in a terminal to launch 3D games or other 3D opengl applications. You may wish to create desktop launchers which use the optirun or primusrun commands in order to streamline this process.

For example, in the MATE desktop environment, when you right click on an empty space in the desktop a popup menu is displayed. One option on this menu is btn:[Create launcher…] which allows you to create a graphical launcher icon for your apps which can be left on the desktop or moved into some folder. Other desktop environments also offer this functionality though the methods differ from desktop to desktop.

Reboot.

Optimus laptops have two graphics cards: an integrated Intel and a discrete NVIDIA one. If the port (DisplayPort / HDMI / VGA) is wired to the Intel chip, you do not need to do anything special to get external monitors to work.

When the external port is wired into the NVIDIA card, you cannot currently expand the screen over monitors without extra effort. Read on if you fall into this category…

This daemon will automatically detect attached displays in the background. It will then perform all the trickery of virtualizing and cloning so that the newly attached screen can be used via conventional screen management methods, such as cloning/extending with xrandr.

For example, if your laptop’s display is called eDP1, and your using a external adapter called HDMI1, and you want the display to be 1920×1080 resolution, you could run the following commands:

There are many different possibilities. Type xrandr with no arguments to see what displays you have attached. See this web page for further information on this subject. Read the manual page for xrandr for even more information on the possibilities this command provides.

If intel-virtual-output works ok running by hand you could add it to your startup automatically if you desire. One way would be to create a /etc/rc.d/rc.local script and add it into there. Another way might be to create a systemd unit file as Type=oneshot. A third way might be to run it at login using whatever mechanism your desktop environment supports for doing such things.

For example, in the MATE desktop environment, there is a mate-session-properties program (System → Preferences → Personal → Startup Applications) that you can run programs from when you login. Most desktop environments offer similar functionality though the methods differ from desktop to desktop.

Some recent laptop models featuring AMI bioses have some compatibility issues with bbswitch and Optimus, making them unable to load into graphics mode and crashing every time it is attempted, as discussed in further details this post on the Bumblebee’s GitHub project page.

If you are trying to use Linux on a recent Optimus laptop and it crashes every time you try to enter a graphics environment, please try adding the following parameters to your boot loader (Fedora users usually have GRUB installed):

This seems to work on most laptop models facing this issue, but bear in mind that this workaround has not been tested in every laptop model ever made – so your mileage may vary. If the problems persist, you could try updating your BIOS or look for more info in the Bumblebee documentation and their community.

If you have a newer laptop (BIOS date 2015 or newer), then Linux 4.8 might break bbswitch since bbswitch does not support the newer, recommended power management method. As a result, the dGPU may fail to power on, fail to power off or worse. See Issue 140 for further information about this problem. As a workaround, add pcie_port_pm=off to your kernel parameters.

Alternatively, if you are only interested in power saving (and perhaps use of external monitors), remove Bumblebee / bbswitch and rely on nouveau runtime power-management (which supports the new method).

On Fedora 25 and 26 a new library called libglvnd was added which initially caused some issues.

primus-1.1.03282015-4 and newera, bumblebee-3.2.1-13 and newer, and (managed version) bumblebee-nvidia-375.26-2 and newer, and (un-managed version) bumblebee-nvidia-3.0-2 and newer will work with the newer mesa and new libglvnd library.

When you first upgrade to mesa-13.0.3-6 or newer bumblebee-nvidia doesn’t know that it needs to rebuild the shim. So you can force that by running the command:

via su as root or via sudo. And the primus bridge should work after that.

You can track this issue upstream here.

See a typo, something missing or out of date, or anything else which can be improved? Edit this document at quick-docs’s git repository.