Will this work with the combination of Wayland and Nvidia Optimus hybrid graphics as in the Thinkpad W and P series workstation laptops where the external port is wired to the discrete GPU?
I'm afraid that I don't have access to the hardware, so I wouldn't know. I'm guessing that it might offer the option, but not work as expected. Hard to tell.
14 December 2019 at 09:48
If you remember, back in 2016, I did the work to get a “Launch on Discrete GPU” menu item added to application in gnome-shell.
This cycle I worked on adding support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, so that the menu item shows up, and the right environment variables are used to launch applications on that device.
[Image]
Tested with another unsupported device...
Behind the scenes
There were a number of problems with the old detection code in switcheroo-control:
- it required the graphics card to use vga_switcheroo in the kernel, which the NVIDIA driver didn't do
- it could support more than 2 GPUs
- and it didn't really actually know which GPU was going to be the “main” one
And, on top of all that, gnome-shell expected the Mesa OpenGL stack to be used, so it only knew the right environment variables to do that, and only for one secondary GPU.
(As a side note, commenters asked me about the KDE support, and how it would integrate, and it turns out that KDE's code just checks for the presence of a file in /sys, which is only present when vga_switcheroo is used. So I would encourage KDE to adopt the switcheroo-control D-Bus API for this)
Closing
All this will be available in Fedora 32, using GNOME 3.36 and switcheroo-control 2.0. We might backport this to Fedora 31 after it's been tested, and if there is enough interest.
"Dual-GPU support follow-up: NVIDIA driver support"
3 Comments -
Trident Vesa Local Bus 512kb :) Reminds me of my first PC: 386 DX 40MHz, but it had Trident 512kb card using the ISA port - it was awful.
13 December 2019 at 18:05
Will this work with the combination of Wayland and Nvidia Optimus hybrid graphics as in the Thinkpad W and P series workstation laptops where the external port is wired to the discrete GPU?
14 December 2019 at 00:28
I'm afraid that I don't have access to the hardware, so I wouldn't know. I'm guessing that it might offer the option, but not work as expected. Hard to tell.
14 December 2019 at 09:48