Recommending proprietary driver on hybrid systems can break 3D

@Martin, this lenovo laptop allows switching cards via BIOS. Selecting 'discrete' will cause nvidia to load (which works properly if -nvidia is installed).

This bug was fixed in the package jockey - 0.9.5-0ubuntu2

---------------
jockey (0.9.5-0ubuntu2) precise; urgency=low

  * Merge from trunk:
    - Add XorgDriverHandler.loaded_drivers(), as a prerequisite for LP #885204
    - Update translations from Launchpad.
  * data/handlers/{fglrx,nvidia}.py: Do not offer these drivers if intel
    X.org driver is loaded. On hybrid systems where intel is active,
    installing the proprietary drivers and their libGL breaks intel.
    (LP: #885204)
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:21:03 -0400

Uploaded to oneiric-proposed, needs ubuntu-sru review.

Hello Bryce, or anyone else affected,

Accepted jockey into oneiric-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

Hello,

I have just upgraded from natty to oneiric and have a hybrid-graphics laptop (Lenovo T520 with i915 and nvidia NVS4200M).

I had bumblebee (support for Nvidia Optimus) working in natty but now I can't seem to have nvidia driver loaded by jockey on account of this code from nvidia.py. From jockey 0.9.4-0ubuntu10.1

if 'intel' in self.loaded_drivers():
      logging.debug('Disabling Nvidia driver on intel/hybrid system')
      return False

What's the reasoning behind this? I was going to attempt to use ironhide (bumblebee evolution) but I need to have both GPU drivers loaded in oneiric like I used to have in natty...

TIA,
Nuno

Nuno, see the bug description. Installing the proprietary NVidia driver installs NVidia's libGL fork, which is not compatible with intel's. So while you configured the BIOS to use the intel card, you'd break your X.org by installing nvidia.

Sorry, didn't read it properly. But I'm confused nevertheless. Did this change from Natty to Oneiric? Because like I said before I could use both GPUs in Natty with the help of Bumblebee, hence I could install nvidia-current and still keep using i915 and the same for X drivers...

So officially in Oneiric there's no way I can use nvidia OPTIMUS?

Yes, this was introduced into oneiric. The current check might very well be too strong and err on the side of safety. You can of course still install the "nvidia-current" package manually. But even better would be if we would find a finer-grained condition when it's safe to offer the nvidia driver and when not.

I'm not quite sure how this works on your box, though. You use both the nvidia and intel card at the same time? That pretty much must mean that X.org running on the intel card does not have 3D acceleration?

Officially in *all* Ubuntu releases there's no way to use nVidia optimus. We don't support bumblebee/ironhide, so the result of installing the nvidia drivers will be to break your 3D. This isn't something that we should be recommending that users do, which is what Jockey was doing!

If you're savvy enough to install bumblebee/ironhide, then installing the nvidia_current package without Jockey shouldn't be hard. We're not preventing you from ‘apt-get install nvidia_current’, we're preventing Jockey from suggesting that the user do something that's guaranteed to break their system.

@Martin @Chris

Well, I can understand bumblebee/ironhide not being supported and I can certainly appreciate your support despite of that.

I think are bigger than just the ones concerning Jockey. I will try to have details later. I did try to apt-get install nvidia-current and then change /etc/alternatives/*gl_conf (that were left pointing at mesa) but then in X.log I got "(EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)" so perhaps this version of X is also not compatible with nVidia GL...

So, I don't know if Jockey does anything else that I should be doing manually to be able to use both GPUs.

With Bumblebee/Ironhide both xorgs running have 3d accel. it's only that glxgears points out very different performances for them :) so I like to have nVidia stopped almost all of the time but I really like to "optirun <my occasionally intensive 3d app>" and launch it.

So, I appreciate if there's more info you can give on this and will try to get to the bottom of this later.

Could anyone please test the proposed Jockey version? We already have another SRU which is waiting on this one.

Meanwhile and following up on my previous post I can say that I have Ironhide working in Oneiric the same way Bumblebee was working in Natty. I don't have a way to disable/enable nvidia card though.I'll post my xSDTs to the appropriate mailing-list. Thanks

So, in this case, this is a temporary workaround?? Cause I have a Dell Vostro 3450 with Intel from core i5 (Sandy Bridge) and AMD Radeon 6630.... I will never could use my AMD chip?

Julián Alarcón [2011-11-29 2:16 -0000]:
> So, in this case, this is a temporary workaround?? Cause I have a Dell
> Vostro 3450 with Intel from core i5 (Sandy Bridge) and AMD Radeon
> 6630.... I will never could use my AMD chip?

If you select the AMD chip in the BIOS and disable the Intel one,
jockey is supposed to offer the FGLRX driver. If it doesn't, please
report back here with /var/log/jockey.log. Thanks!

That's the problem Matias, my Dell BIOS doesn't have this option, and many other niter

I arrived here because I have broken 3D as promised - I have a NVidia Geforce GT 525M in a Dell 5110 (Q15R) with Intel HD 3000 built in.

However, there's no obvious information as to how I get myself out of the mess which Jockey has got me in because...

* Jockey doesn't tell me it's installing a .deb and which one, and offers me no means of reversing it.
* Jockey's 'remove' doesn't actually remove stuff apparently. It just breaks the Intel support by installing a package and leaves it that way, even when you revisit Jockey and ask it to reverse the steps.

Basically I had working 3D desktop effects in LiveCD and original install, then broken effects since running Jockey, and still broken even after asking Jockey to remove, and removing the xorg.conf added by nvidia-xconfig as advised by nvidia-settings.

I think I need to install Synaptic, and remove nvidia-current, but there's been no discussion in this bug thread what people should actually do who are experiencing the bug to get back at least to Intel graphics.

Sure enough, going to Synaptic and asking to completely remove the package nvidia-current has given me back 3D desktop effects.

Forgot to mention, a restart of X was required too to reverse the effects of the Jockey bug (logging in and out again).

We need somebody with hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics to please test the proposed package per the instructions in Comment #5.

@Cefn, can you verify that with the -proposed version of jockey installed, it does not recommend the proprietary nvidia drivers?

Thanks!

Tested it with jockey-gtk and jockey-common from oneiric-proposed. I have finally arrived at the satisfying announcement "No Proprietary Drivers in use in this system", and it offered me nothing at all.

Worth noting I have a bumblebee install now which might potentially complicate things, I guess it won't interfere with the hardware detection routines or Jockey.

Thanks a lot for testing this!

This bug was fixed in the package jockey - 0.9.4-0ubuntu10.1

---------------
jockey (0.9.4-0ubuntu10.1) oneiric-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/control: Update Vcs-Bzr: for oneiric branch.
  * jockey/xorg_driver.py, tests/handlers.py: Add
    XorgDriverHandler.loaded_drivers(), as a prerequisite for LP#885204. Patch
    cherrypicked from trunk r756.
  * data/handlers/nvidia.py: Do not offer this driver if intel X.org driver
    is loaded. On hybrid systems where intel is active, installing the
    proprietary drivers and their libGL breaks intel. (LP: #885204)
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:10:22 -0400

Well done!
But this is rather a bug on th side of the nvidia driver. It's not so unusual to have several X drivers installed. Another example besides systems with two graphics cards is a (real) X client/server setup:

Say you have (like us) a server and several different thin clients making X connections across the network, the server needs to have the X drivers for all the graphics cards of the different clients installed (at least if you want to have graphics acceleration via GLX). Now, if one of the clients happens to have an nvidia card, the server needs to run the nvidia X server to get acceleration for this client. This breaks acceleration for all clients with other graphics cards.

This is a huge problem in, for example, the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).

Since the real cause is the broken nvidia driver, is there any chance of asking the guys at NVidia to fix this?