9
ltlian
4y

Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.

I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".

The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.

I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.

The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.

Comments
  • 0
    Try Manjaro Nvidia support is baked in I believe
  • 1
    @pythonInRelay oh man. You're talking to someone who's way beyond that stage. That's what's supposed to work but doesn't. I've even tried a fresh install of ubuntu server with no trace of display related stuff preinstalled and used nvidias proprietary drivers. Same result where I can see it's using the gpu, but once I launch x the gpu basically hibernates and I have to hard reboot.

    I'm only falling back to nouveau or i915 to have a working system. I'm pretty thorough at blacklisting and/or purging it otherwise.
  • 0
    @pythonInRelay If only it was that easy.

    @ltlian You can also switch to another vterm and kill your x11 instance.

    I fought with this exact issue for a week at my previous job. Never did get it working, no matter what I tried, including handcrafting an xorg.conf. I eventually decided I was happy with ~13fps and constant power issues.

    Also, the 4k internal display made for reeaallllly small terminal output while fighting with this!
  • 1
    My money is it is something to do with the session manager and dbus-launch or wayland
  • 0
    @pythonInRelay Because it doesn't always work.

    Case in point: my work laptop at the time was also an XPS 15. No matter what I tried I could never get the nVidia drivers to work, and I consider myself decently skilled.
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