nVidia Optimus with binary blob: can HDMI be used?

Lori

Hi, I have an nVidia Optimus setup which works fairly well, I have Steam configured to start games with rendering on the nVidia chip, CUDA software works, and everything else is using the Intel integrated GPU. However, the HDMI output on my Dell L502x is connected to the nVidia chip, and I wasn't able to find any reliable source of information stating that it should be possible to use it with the binary drivers. Before going down the path of switching between Noveau and nVidia drivers (as the HDMI reportedly works with Noveau, but I haven't tested that yet) I was wondering if someone knows a definite source for making HDMI work with PRIME somehow. I'm using KDE 5, and one encouraging sign is that there is an overlay popup when I connect or disconnect a TV over HDMI, saying "No External Display", but obviously the TV doesn't show up on the display list.

This is recorded in /var/log/messages when connecting/disconnecting the TV:

Muso · Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2018 4:28 pm Post subject:

Have you read through the wiki article on this?
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Lori · Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2018 8:04 am Post subject:

Hmm, somehow I missed that article, thanks for bringing it to my attention. However, it didn't work on first try, I need to dig deeper, see if I can make it work.
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Lori · Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:06 am Post subject:

I'm a bit stuck, so maybe someone can help. I have a working Bumblebee setup, where I can run 3D applications on my laptop screen with optirun with great performance. I created this setup a while back, and it's not exacly as detailed in Gentoo Wiki Bumblebee page. Fo example I had to modify the DISPLAY variable to be :8 as that was the default back then.

I'm testing with the i3 window manager, since that's already installed. It seems to start correctly with optirun:

Lori · Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:11 am Post subject:

The synergy part seems to work, as when I move my mouse off to the right, I see this on the console:

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

I've not heard of synergy for this purpose yet. I've been using intel-virtual-output, which exposes the Nvidia's outputs on the Intel's X server. It works, usually. There's plenty of bugs and the performance is bad.

I eventually switched to nouveau and xrandr's setoutputprovidersource. Now I'm getting much better performance (stable framerate) on external outputs, but much worse 3D performance out of the GPU. Sigh.