nvidia-xrun

These utility scripts aim to make the life easier for nvidia cards users. It started with a revelation that bumblebee in current state offers very poor performance. This solution offers a bit more complicated procedure but offers a full GPU utilization(in terms of linux drivers).

This is a fork for use with Debian testing/sid and bumblebee. It has not been tested to work with all configurations. It also assumes you have multiarch, and might spuriously fail if you don't, though this has not been tested.

Please note that if you are using tmux, you will have to either close your session and start a new one when you login with nvidia-xrun, or re-import your enviornment variables (DISPLAY and LD_LIBRARY_PATH) to your tmux session when you log in. You will need the nvidia directories as specified in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to run command-line programs using the nvidia card (such as glxinfo). I'm not sure why debian is so finnicky about keeping these environment variables preserved; ymmv.

Installation:

An installation script (sudo make install) is a work-in-progress.

1. install xserver-xorg-legacy (necessary to call startx as root). For best compatibility, make sure you have bumblebee-nvidia and multiarch-support installed too.

2. copy ./nvidia-xrun to somewhere in your $PATH (e.g. /usr/bin/nvidia-xrun)

3. copy ./nvidia-xinitrc to /etc/x11/xinit/nvidia-xinitrc

4. copy ./nvidia-xorg.conf to /etc/x11/nvidia-xorg.conf

Usage:

1. switch to free tty

2. login

3. run nvidia-xrun app

4. enjoy

Currently sudo is required as the script needs to wake up GPU, modprobe the nvidia driver and perform cleanup afterwards. For this we use bbswitch.

Packages

Use the original version of this repo from Witko to obtain the aur package. There is no debian package as of this time. This is a completely unofficial and untested (except on my machine) fork of the original project, aimed at providing a stepping stone for Debian/bumblebee users, and that may eventually turn into a more universally usable fork.

Issue and pull requests are welcome. Please go on the nvidia forums and tell them to support PRIME render offloading! That will make this utility obsolete and bring true Optimus functionality to Linux.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/957981/linux/prime-render-offloading-on-nvidia-optimus/