is it possible to have better support for Optimus?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 00:46 -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> Most mid-range or higher laptops on the market (at least when I shopped
> for a laptop last year) seem to have Nvidia Optimus graphics.  These
> don't run well on Fedora out-of-the-box - at least on my laptop the fan
> is constantly running because the Nvidia processor is constantly on.
> I don't want the Nvidia processor running - ever (so far).
> 
> In the past I've used the acpi_call module, which is somewhat flakey
> and a hassle.  Then I switched to Ubuntu for a bit, largely since Bumblebee
> (https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project) worked on Ubuntu.  Now there is
> Bumblebee for Fedora, so I switched back to Fedora.
> 
> However, it's still a hassle that Bumblebee is an external project
> and there is no Fedora package.  A recently kernel update disabled
> Bumblebee because of some version incompatibility.  I was able to
> re-enable it, but this is not something a typical user would be
> able to do - or even know about.
> 
> Any chance Bumblebee could be packaged for Fedora?  Or is there some
> other recommended solution?  (I know I should offer to package it
> myself, but I have no relevant kernel - or packaging - experience.)

Aside from Matthias' reply, there's another option, depending on your
use case and your hardware - if you just want to use the Intel adapter
all the time, and if your hardware allows it, you might be able to just
disable the NVIDIA adapter entirely at the firmware level. I have a Sony
laptop whose firmware can be hacked to expose an option that lets you
set the graphics subsystem to 'dedicated' mode, which means that when
you turn on the system, whichever adapter you have selected via the
hardware toggle (which my laptop has) will be the only one that's
actually powered up and visible to the OS at all; the other adapter is
completely disabled. I believe some Optimus systems offer similar
control at the firmware level, and probably some that don't can be
hacked. This works great for me as it means I can just set the toggle to
the Intel adapter and all OSes behave as if the laptop doesn't have an
NVIDIA adapter at all, nice and simple.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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