nvidia on optimus laptop: not loading, flicker

ExecutorElassus

I'm trying to get nvidia-drivers running on my relatively new laptop (an MSI GP72 from earlier this year). It has a pretty hefty nvidia chipset, and also an intel set.

I'm given to understand that there are several steps to this, which I've followed from this guide. However, that guide is pretty old, and they don't seem to work for me.

When I log into lightdm and then enlightenment, on kernels-4.5.* and nvidia-drivers from a couple months ago (haven't synced in a while) I get an error message about there being no usable GLX module.

I just synced today, updating the kernel to 4.6.1 and nvidia-drivers to 367.18. Now, when I log in, I get the same thing, but there is also a horrible flicker to the screen.

Can anybody help me get this configured? All the guides I see for getting Optimus working (or should I be looking into Bumblebee?) look a couple years out of date.

Cheers,

EE

ExecutorElassus · Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2016 4:45 pm Post subject:

Bump/update: I've updated my kernel now to 4.6.3 and nvidia-drivers to 367.27, and the problem is persisting. When I start lightdm, the screen flickers. However (and this is weird) if I move the mouse, the flickering stops while the mouse is in motion. It then starts flickering again once the mouse stops.

What might be causing this?

Cheers,

EE

Atmmac · Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 1:28 pm Post subject:

Can you post up a copy of your xorg.conf? Also did you put this is your lightdm config file for boot?

ExecutorElassus · Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 1:50 pm Post subject:

The flickering is related to the introduction of PSR with the 4.6 kernels. If I set "i915.enable_psr=0" as a kernel option, the screen won't flicker, but also won't update until I move the mouse (either situation makes my laptop basically useless). I haven't tried other settings yet. See this bug report.

I'll boot up my laptop sometime this weekend and see about your other questions.

Cheers,

EE

Atmmac · Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2016 3:10 pm Post subject:

Interesting. I am on 4.6.3 and I am not experiencing this issue. I have a 4k monitor attached with no flickering whatsoever. I upgraded to 4.6.3 last week. I did have to tweak my xorg.conf a bit as a result of some changes that were implemented in newer versions of xorg-server.

This is my xorg.cong for reference.

vilehost · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2016 Posts: 26

if you use bumblebee, install the one from 'seden' overlay

ExecutorElassus · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2016 7:29 pm Post subject:

UPDATE: setting "i915.enable_psr=3" (instead of "0") in the kernel options fixed the flickering. However, now I'm on to the lack of direct rendering.

'glxinfo | grep rendering' returns: