Ubuntu – How does bumblebee optirun actually work

bumblebeenvidia

When I use bumblebee optirun command to start a program , Google Chrome for example, my laptop indicates that it switched to nvidia GPU. My question is: Is then whole desktop rendered by nvidia or just the program I started with optirun ?
I can't imagine that some parts of screen are rendered by one graphic card and other parts by another, but the way optirun command is used (in combination with specific program)makes me wonder.

Best Answer

optirun is an abstraction for VirtualGL. This runs a headless X screen with your Nvidia card and renders the application on that screen. The result is copied over to your visible screen. VGL also allows you to send the result over a network which is pretty cool.

Everything that isn't being optirun'd is directly rendered through your Intel device. That includes the desktop (by default - I'm certain you could hack everything to be optirun if you really wanted - but I wouldn't recommend it).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – The Bumblebee daemon has not been started yet or the socket path /var/run/bumblebee.socket was incorrect

The error "Could not connect to bumblebee daemon - is it running?" means that the Bumblebee daemon refused/ failed to start.

In your case, "Module 'nvidia' is not found.". This means that the Nvidia kernel driver has not properly been installed. Make sure that you install the linux-headers-generic package and reinstall the nvidia package:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
sudo apt-get install --reinstall nvidia-current

It could also occur if your system is not detected as an Optimus laptop which has two graphics card, an Intel and a Nvidia one. Check your /var/log/syslog file for messages from "bumblebeed" (the Bumblebee daemon):

grep bumblebeed /var/log/syslog

If the message is No nVidia graphics card found, quitting., then your laptop has no Nvidia chip or it is disabled in BIOS. The message No Optimus system detected, quitting. is shown when the Intel graphics card cannot be found. In either case, check the BIOS settings for an "Optimus mode / integrated only / discrete only" option (or: "detect Optimus).

The output of the command lspci -nn | grep '\[030[02]\]: should look like:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0046] (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 425M] [10de:0df0] (rev ff)

Ubuntu – How to install nvidia optimus driver

I recently had this problem as well.

For me, all I had to do was run the following commands. I'll break them down:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo apt-get purge bbswitch-dkms bumblebee-nvidia

That installs the PPA-Purge utility and removes BBSwitch and Bumblebee

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

That installs the proper Linux headers. For some reason, BBSwitch wouldn't (for lack of a better word, insert) itself into the kernel.

Then a simple

sudo apt-get install bbswitch-dkms bumblebee-nvidia

fixed everything. Oh, and a reboot, of course :)

Hopefully this will help you at least a little bit! Please let me know how you go

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – The Bumblebee daemon has not been started yet or the socket path /var/run/bumblebee.socket was incorrect

Ubuntu – How to install nvidia optimus driver

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