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Paralyz3d
Asked: 2018-04-29 02:56:12 +0800 CST

bumblebee doesn't work on Ubuntu 18.04

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I installed a fresh version of Ubuntu 18.04 on my optimus laptop then I followed the instructions from this site to install the bumblebee package. It succeeded but I saw a line during the installation which stated that it couldn't remove the nouveau module. I did a reboot and I ran optirun --status to see if it's working and it outputted that discrete nvidia card is disable, then I tried running optirun glxgears and this error message came up.

[ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) Failed to load module "mouse" (module does not exist, 0)

I have tried reinstalling Ubuntu and bumblebee.

I have an NVidia Geforce 940MX card.

nvidia graphics bumblebee nvidia-optimus 18.04

2 Answers

  1. There was one major change in nvidia driver that prevents bumblebee from working - glvnd (https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd). In short, bumblebee is running a separate instance of xorg on a separate display, which glvnd cannot handle. This behaviour should be disabled for bumblebee. Put the following line to /etc/environment

    __GLVND_DISALLOW_PATCHING=1

    In order to make glvnd work, nvidia also changed directories where related files/drivers are located. Bumblebee should be reconfigured accordingly (/etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf):

    LibraryPath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules/input

    Last issue that prevents bumblebee from unloading nvidia drivers is caused by nvidia-drm which is not supposed to be loaded in the bumblebee enviroment. This is easy to disable by aliasing it to off (/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia.conf):

    blacklist nvidia
blacklist nvidia-drm
blacklist nvidia-modeset

#alias nvidia off
alias nvidia-drm off
#alias nvidia-modeset off

    nvidia-modeset is not needed as well, but loading it doesn't hurt and you may want to disable it as well.

    I would also disable gpu manager (What does gpu-manager do?), as it's not needed in this case (/etc/default/grub): add nogpumanager to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT section.

    I also had some issues with nvidia-persistenced service in the past (https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/driver-persistence/index.html#persistence-daemon), you may want to disable it as well by issuing sudo systemctl disable nvidia-persistenced.

    NOTE: I'm using nVidia 390 from https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

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  2. Bumblebee has sadly not been updated since 14.04. You can still get it to work however, but I do not know of any existing 18.04 Tutorial.

    You could however give this a shot;

    https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/7ulymw/for_anyone_struggling_to_set_up_bumblebee/

    I got the exact same problem as you, buggy drivers, having to reboot after switching between gpu's (and this making my nvidia card unloadable, thanks nvidia).

    Linux is great, but nvidia's driver support is poor, and because of it, a lot of optimus people pull their hair out trying to make it work, including me.

    I got the exact same gpu as you do.

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