Native Nvidia Optimus and Fedora 19

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 12:26 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote: 
> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 16:47:38 +0000,
>    "Powell, Michael" <Michael_Powell at mentor.com> wrote:
> >
> >Unfortunately, solely relying on the integrated Intel GPU is not an option for me :)
> 
> The 3.12 kernel is supposed to have better optimus support, so maybe things 
> will improve soon. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ0ODM
> 

Meanwhile, there is the Bumblebee project:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee.  It offers partial support for
Optimus.  You can use the Intel driver as your main one and run
individual programs on the nVidia GPU via a command-line wrapper
program.

There are still some issues (Fedora 18&19 require the nVidia binary
driver at the moment, for example), but I had it functional until I
tried to use an external monitor today.  That can apparently be done,
but one loses much of the utility (i.e., power management) of the
dual-driver configuration.  Not sure yet if I'm sticking with it, but
I'll definitely be keeping my eye on it.
-- 
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu