[Nix-dev] Experiences with Nvidia Optimus?

[Arie Middelkoop]

Hi,

Does any of you have experience with getting hardware acceleration for
nvidia optimus laptop videocards (e.g. GT555M) to work? My fresh new laptop
with Nixos is getting into a workable state, but this videocard issue seems
quite a pain.

If I understand the webpages that I read so far correctly, the difficulty
with this optimus technology seems to be that the nvidia card is acting
like a coprocessor for the intel videocard inside the processor. The nvidia
card is thus not physically connected to any screen. When I start X with
only the nvidia driver enabled, it does recognize the device, but does not
find any screen. When I load the driver for intel as well, then it only
uses the intel card.

There seems to be an Ubuntu package called Ironhide (called before:
Bumblebee, and before that Optimus Prime) that somehow seems to address
this issue, so that you can actually map applications to a particular
device (or something like that). I was wondering if any of you had
experience with this?

I'm trying to read up on things, but documentation is rather scarce. What
is particularly confusing me is that in some descriptions the name
"nvidia-current" is used to refer to a nvidia driver, which is apparently
different from "nvidia"...

Although it is likely a separate issue, when using the intel driver, all
KDE popdown menus have a graphical corruption (e.g. fully black), whereas
e.g. popup menus in Chrome do not have any corruption. But this is an
incentive to me to put in some effort to get it up and running properly :)

Cheers,
Arie
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