Old problem is back! bbswitch is broken!

Many thanks, Colin!

I read somewhere else that nvidia 390x drivers in rpmfusion are already patched to work with kernel 4.16x. Don’t know if this true. Searching …

Start with searching at nVidia’s own web site. There it takes less than 60 seconds to find out that 396 drivers do not support GeForce GT 500 series products and 390 drivers do.

Also rpmfusion? What does that have to do with anything here? Isn’t rpmfusion for Fedora users?

Post-edit: To be sure I would not have known this without going to the “supported products” list for both the 396 and 390 driver as otherwise they are labeled as “short-lived” and “long-lived”. If I saw this page only I would think the both supported exactly the same hardware. What nVidia is doing does not make sense to me.

So now that we know the hardware involved, that driver won’t work with that hardware. Might be a good idea if he @adelson.oliveira does that with latest 390 driver.

The idea is to look for a possible patch for the nvidia 390x driver to work with kernel 4.16x and, if this do exist, find out what to do to use it here.

But yes, looking for the geforce.com files may be an option …

That does make sense. But I’m getting lost on exact software versions for nvidia crap. I thought the Colin had built the 390.67 driver for kernel 4.16.13 at the same time as the 396.24 driver was. They are both in updates repo and they both show the same build date. So maybe @adelson.oliveira needs only to try the 390.67 driver instead of the 396.24 one? Maybe. I’m still not understanding why the 390 one supports GeForece GT 500 series and the 396 one does not.

I guess I was using nvidia 390.67 and it did not work, not sure. However, I’ve found this

NVIDIA 390.77 Linux Driver Brings Updated Kernel Support, Fixes - Phoronix

where it is said that long-live drivers 390.77 included support to newer kernels (up to 4.17).

Thus, I think I will file an enhancement bug report suggesting updating nvidia drivers from 390.67 to 390.77

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I’m kind of sure that the OMV 390.67 driver should work with kernel 4.16.13. Whether it works for you is, of course, a different matter.

And getting the 390.77 driver as well as the 396.45 driver built for OMV and kernel 4.17.5 would be a great and wonderful thing. Just be aware that @Colin is dealing with something at this time and it may take longer than usual. We don’t seem to have any one else willing to build these packages. Volunteers wanted and needed.

Updated nVidia drivers will be in testing in about a half hour; fortunately my previous effort allowed these to be built easily. Please report whether they work or not.

Yes. I’ve tested drivers 390.77 and they seem to build flawlessly with kernel 4.16 at OMV LX 3.03.
The following files are available:

$ ls /lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/char/drm/
nvidia-current.ko nvidia-drm.ko nvidia-long-lived.ko nvidia-modeset.ko nvidia-uvm.ko

I’m going to report this also at
https://forum3.openmandriva.org/t/new-nvidia-drivers-for-kernel-4-17-x-available-for-testing/1988/2

However, although
modprobe nvidia-long-lived
works just fine now, I was not yet able to test these nvidia packages in my hybrid graphics laptop since optirun command still seems to look for 396.45 drivers (nvidia-current).

There is a nvidia-current.ko file at kernel tree and this came from nvidia-long-lived 390.77 package, is this supposed to be so?

Many thanks

Post-edit: Let’s make this thread about BumbleBee. And separate nVidia drivers conversation from your problem with BumbleBee.

The nVidia drivers are one issue deserving of it’s own dedicated conversation elswhere. There basically the issue is nVidia drivers work or they don’t.

Bbswitch is a separate issue which we can now discuss here. Next question is there a separate unique bug report for bbswitch?

Also moving this from Cooker to Support as I’m pretty sure you aren’t using Cooker.

Ok. If this is going to be a bumblebee thread, I just wonder why bumblebee seems to look for nvidia-current, would it be that it was hardwired set during its building? Or could it be that the availability of a nvidia-current.ko at kernel’s tree made bumblebee to try it?

Your could test this by moving the nvidia-current module so that it isn’t available.

Also are there any config files for bbswitch to look at? Does bbswitch package need to be rebuilt every time there is a new kernel? Does bbswitch need to be rebuilt every time there are new nvidia drivers? Is bbswitch a maintained package upstream?

bbswitch needs it’s own bug report.

Post-edit: Getting developers to look at an issue sometimes is hard work. It sometimes takes me making multiple request for weeks. There are other times when someone looks at a problem right away. I never know which way a given issue is going to be. This would probably be expedited if other users would go on IRC and ask as well.

Did it. After bumblebee optirun command, dmesg has a line saying bumblebee tried an “out of tree module”. Put nvidia-current.ko back, tried optirun again, now dmesg shows an attempt to use nvidia’s driver 396.45, it warns this is not supported and refer to the 390x as an option, and ends saying “No NVIDIA graphics adapter found!”

Bumblebee has a config file. What I did was to change there nvidia-current reference to nvidia-long-lived and (stop, enable and start bumblebeed service) then dmesg shows “NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 390.77 Tue Jul 10 18:28:52 PDT 2018 (using threaded interrupts)” which is OK! However, still the output of

$ optirun glxspheres64
[ 4555.874308] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) Failed to load module “nvidia” (module does not exist, 0)

[ 4555.874348] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

Still searching …

I don’t know much about bbswitch, it does not seem to be maintained in the last five years maybe because it has just worked fine since then. Would it be revised and are these problems related to bbswitch? I don’t know.

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I guess the problem is now on xorg configurations. Tried XFdrake but it tries to install driver 396.x instead.
Bumblebee has a xorg.conf.nvidia file where I intend to try a few things …

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Well it isn’t working just fine anymore. Not much (if anything) in Linux works well if it is not maintained. If you want to get this working again you’re going to need to get the attention of a developer to work on it and keep it maintained for OM.

Adelson you might find this interesting. I don’t have time to study it at the moment but it could be a way forward. Optimus

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Having the proper nvidia driver to work with, after a few trial and many errors, I can finally switch between intel and nvidia graphic cards!

Bumblebee config file is all configured for nvidia-current. Changing any reference of nvidia-current to the available nvidia driver,

nvidia-current => nvidia-long-lived

in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf made it to work.

Thus, I think bbswitch.ko is doing the proper job also. So there is a problem with the installation of bbswitch but once one does the postinstall job manually it does work. I’ll report this to bbswitch/bumblebee GitHub project.

Thanks for this reference, Colin.

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That is good to hear. Good to know.

Good :+1:

It would be great if you can write a short (or long) how-to, to be moved/copied in Resources category.

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