Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

> That NVIDIA is now able to implement Optimus support in its proprietary driver is primarily down to...the PRIME infrastructure in the Linux kernel and X Server...

This is simply false, since adequate open-source support compatible with the current Ubuntu kernel has been available in the form of Bumblebee for over a year.

I have had an Optimus laptop for a while now, and since I got it I have been running Linux Mint, with the Bumblebee PPA [1]. With Bumblebee, applications use the Intel GPU if you run them normally:

$ wine

If you want that application to use the nVidia GPU instead, you can pass it as an argument to Bumblebee's "optirun" command:

$ optirun wine

I will grant that Bumblebee's approach is very hacky, and the DMA-based approach used by the new proprietary driver is likely to lead to higher performance and/or less CPU usage.

But I have found Bumblebee to be very stable, and more importantly, it's been available since I got the laptop, unlike the proprietary Optimus support -- which is still vaporware.

[1] http://bumblebee-project.org/

I <heart> Bumblebee. I just got an Optimus laptop (Lenovo U410 ideapad) and was appalled to discover I couldn't even run VMD [1].

Having installed Bumblebee, I can just use use optirun to provide CUDA enhancement just by initializing VMD using

$ optirun VMD

It's just that easy, and while it is a bit hacky, if you live on the command line it's not a major issue (especially when combined with aliases).

[1] - http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

> if you live on the command line it's not a major issue

I didn't intend to call the method of running things by adding another command to the beginning of the invocation "hacky." Although GUI-only users may see Bumblebee that way, until frontends / desktop support is developed.

I was referring more to Bumblebee's internal architecture: running multiple X servers and ferrying data between them.

And neither of these notes about the "hackiness" are any criticism of the Bumblebee developers: They've done great work making the software as reliable as I've personally found it to be, and getting it out there as quickly after the release of Optimus as they did, with AFAIK zero support from nVidia.

Even if the internals are hacky, as an end-user I have no complaints; unless you're messing with the config file, or upgrading from a very early version of Bumblebee, its complicated design is well-hidden from the end-user.

Doing front-ends and desktop UI integration is somewhat out of scope for Bumblebee as a project. It would be nice to have, I suppose, but I personally don't need it (I always use the command line and can figure out how to manually make launch icons if I need to), and it doesn't require the same intense knowledge of the guts of the Linux video subsystem that writing Bumblebee itself did. So I feel it would be much more logical to have those things be separate projects, since they require a different developer skillset and don't have a dependency on the internal details of Bumblebee.

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