How does Bumblebee work with Optimus NVIDIA GPU
What is bumblebee?
Sounds like the name of an Insect or perhaps you would recognize it
with the Transformer Series of Movies. The yellow Car which uses the
voices from the Car's Audio system, to talk to people. Well all this
is true, However What I am referring to is entirely different and it
concerns Linux. Especially Linux on Computers with the Optimus
Graphic Cards from Nvidia. These systems are very different from the
traditional single graphics Card systems. In Traditional systems what
would happen on the desktop and laptop computers is that, you would
have only one graphics card. Either an Integrated graphics card or a
dedicated graphics card.
What if your system
had the option of having both types of cards. I mean if a computer
had an Integrated graphics card capable enough of running most of the
graphics stack on your computer, and onother dedicated Card to handle
the heavy duty gaming stuff, How would things be then ? How would one
manage the graphics cards and their settings then?
This is mostly
achieved in modern hardware by using a combination of an Intel
Integrated GPU and a secondary discrete NVIDIA gpu. The technology is
called as Optimus. Well most of the latops these days come with the
NVIDIA/INTEL Optimus setup. However having the technology at the
hardware level only is not sufficient. We need to have a software
stack which would then use the technology within the Operating
Systems. How do we achieve this? and Quite Frankly Microsoft Windows
leads in this area as the most widely used Desktop operating system
hence with windows, The Optimus Technology is quite well supported
out of the box wth almost zero effort on the user's part. Whenever a
graphics intensive application is launched the system automatically
switches to the more powerful NVIDIA GPU. Which is great as the user
gets great performance without having to worry about anything. When
there is no need for the NVIDIA GPU, the System automatically
switches back to the Intel Integrated GPU. The result being more
efficient utilization of the system resources and Improved battery
life with optimum performance for you graphic intensive applications.
Well that is how it
was supposed to work. However that is true only on the windows side
of the world. We know MS Windows is not the end of the world. So we now talk a bit about Linux. With Linux the road is a bit bumpy,
however we also have a perfect solution for Linux. We rather have two
solutions to the same problem. I will cover both in this POST.
We need to
understand one basic fact that with Linux, the automatic switching
from Intel to NVIDIA GPU and Vice Versa is not yet supported. We can
switch however user intervention is needed. Apart from this there is
no other caveat to this.
The First Option is
called NVIDIA PRIME. Under NVIDIA Prime, One Installs nvidia drivers
alongwith the nvidia prme and nvidia-settings. In this method
Nvidia-Settings program is used to switch between the driver. One can
use only on GPU at one time. The Entire System will use on GPU at one
time. We can Change and choose Which GPU we want however after
selecting we need to logout of the session and start a new session.
So this is a soluion requiring the least amount of configuration and
consequently we have to live with the fact that we need to switch he
graphic Card for the whole system and start a new session to use the
newly selected GPU.(This works only with Nvidia Closed Source Drivers
supplied by NVIDIA)
The Second Option is
called the Bumblebee !! you hear it .. It is indeed called Bumblebee.
Well I am not going to go into why it is called so, the fact of the
matter is that it is a great solution to use in case you have the
Optimus based hardware like I have. It allows you to select the GPU
at run time by selecting which application you would want to run on
the dedicated GPU. Yes it is true. You can launch applications to use
a the high power NVIDIA GPU. By default the system always uses the
Integrated Intel GPU. However when needed you can launch a
application specifically targeting the NIDIA GPU.Not only that this
works well with NVIDIA Closed Source Drivers but with the nuoveau
Open Source Drivers as well.
I am going to be
elaborating a more on the Bumblebee Stuff as there is still a lot of
confusion for the new users to Linux as to how it exactly works.
Bumblebee is a very Interesting piece of software. It is however
often misunderstood and hence not everyone prefers it. But I strongly recommend it. Almost all Linux Distros have a small wiki dedicated to
how to get Bumblebee working. There is a special case of Ubuntu and
anything based on Ubuntu that I would like to point this article to.
If there is a new
user ever starting the switch from Other Operating Systems to Linux,
there is a high chance that he will land on to a Ubuntu or Ubuntu
Spin. If the user has an Optmus Laptop then things become really
Interesting. The user is used to out of box experiences and Linux in
this case does not offer one. So there needs so be a specific
wiki/documentation for this. There is however i personally believe it
is not sufficient. There are some specfics which I think are still
not covered in any Wiki for Ubuntu. I am going to focus on Ubuntu
beause I fee Ubuntu documentation on bumblebee is poor.
Ok let us Understand
the Operation and how it to be correctly configured.
While using Bumbelee
to control the Optimus/Hybrid graphics on a laptop we must understand
that Bumblebee takes total control of the Driver or the Nvidia
Graphics Card. This means that Bumblebee Daemon controls the loading
and unloading of the Driver. The Module for Loading the Graphics
Drivers for Nvidia Cards, Namely Nouveau and nvidia-XXX driver is to
be controlled by Bumblebee.
So here is a few
things one needs to ensure while configuring bumblebee on Ubuntu. We
need to ensure that the Driver/Kernel Module for the NVIDIA CARD is completely Blacklisted so that it never loads automatically. We want
bumblebee to completely control this card.
This can be done as
below.
- Blacklist Noueau Driver so it does not load automatically. (This is generally done Automatically by the Bumblebee Install.) Config Files to look at. /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-XXX_hybrid.conf in case you Installed your Nvidia Proprietary Drivers alongwith Bumblebee. If you do not plan on using only Noveau, Then you must manually create a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf and add one line to it, blacklist nouveau.
- Blacklist the NVIDIA-XXX Driver , We need to ensure that the NVIDIA-XXX driver needs to stay blacklisted as well. This most likely shoul happen automatically however if you are using any driver newer thatn Nvidia-331, Then it is a good option to look in /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf. This file is automatically generated while Installing Nvidia Graphics Drivers after installing Bumblebee. If you do not see the driver you are using in the file, you must add it manually.
- Automatically load i915 Driver for Intel card. We need to add bbswitch and i195 to the /etc/modules file. This is because we want the bbswitch module to load automatically, this is what actually turns on and off the Nvidia Graphics Card. We also want that the Intel Integrated Card to be in use always so we add that to the file.
The above three steps ensure that we have only Intel Card enabled by default and Nvidia Drivers completely removed from getting
automatically loaded. We also are loading he bbswitch module
automatically which will actually switch the Nvidia Gaphics Cad ON and
OFF when launching any program using optirun or primusrun prefix from
the terminal. These two are the commands that need to be prefixed
while launching wine or Steam depending on which of these you use or
gaming. Or any other program which needs some Juice from the Nvidia
Graphics Card.
Configure Bumblebee to use your Nivida-Drivers
The Only other piece of configuration that needs to be done is as
below.
sudo gedit /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
1. line 22:
Driver=nvidia
2. line 55:
KernelDriver=nvidia-331
3. line 58:
LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-331:/usr/lib32/nvidia-331
4. line 61:
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-331/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
5. Reinstall
bbswitch-dkms:
sudo apt-get install
--reinstall bbswitch-dkms
6. Reboot
Note:- Just ensure that you replace nvidia-331 with the driver you
have Installed.
If you are planing to use Nouveau driver then you don't need the
above configuration, I will automatially work with Nouveay driver.
I now hope that after readin this post, many Ubuntu Users will
understand the Bumblebee Concepts Clearly.
