
Nvidia Optimus support for Linux - SandB0x
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee
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ra
I still can't believe Nvidia didn't do this themselves.

Last year for the first time ever, I specifically refused to buy a laptop with
Nvidia. I didn't want to spend money on a discrete graphics card that I
wouldn't be able to use.

~~~
cookiecaper
We should note that nvidia has rewritten huge chunks of X internally (and that
the blob provides these rewritten pieces), X isn't designed to support this
kind of thing in the first place, big distros have plans to move off of X in
the semi-near future (1 yr+, but still relatively short amount of value for
the investment if we assume X will begin to fall into disuse) and the move to
Wayland will impose significant development overhead on nvidia anyway (since
Wayland requires KMS, which nvidia doesn't currently support), and nvidia has
been looking for extra Linux developers for a long time without luck (see job
listing at <http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61644> ). Also
consider that nvidia's primary market for Linux is big workstations, etc.
(with OpenCL emerging), a field where Optimus support is not relevant.

I have also been disappointed to see poor support for Optimus and related
techs on Linux but when you look at the costs involved it's not too surprising
that nvidia would be reluctant to implement support in its existing blob for
the existing infrastructure. Fingers crossed that they're working on it for
the Wayland/KMS timeframe.

~~~
trotsky
Somewhat off topic, but do you know why KMS seems to be such a big hurdle for
the 3d video vendors' drivers? ATI's binery blob driver also doesn't support
KMS even though they seem to actively develop it. The open source radeon
driver does, but it doesn't support a sufficient amount of OpenGL to allow
commercial native linux games or wine+directx games to run.

On the surface it doesn't seem like KMS support would be a big problem for
people otherwise building complex graphics drivers.

As an aside, I use a laptop with AMD's switchable graphics solution. You can
set and forget it to either setting rather well, but if you actually try
switching back and forth you start running into tons of bugs, instabilities,
usability problems etc.

------
saintfiends
Can this thing shutdown Nvidia GPU to save battery and can this be used to run
Unity.

I ask this because I got a laptop recently without proper research as Nvidia
seem to release there drivers to linux, which they did but without Optimus
support.

