Fincer / nvidia-xrun

Utility to run separate X with discrete nvidia graphics with full performance

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).

Usage:

1. Make sure your user belongs to 'sudo' group* (see below for further info)
2. Execute nvidia-xrun [app] in any terminal
3. Enjoy

Available options:

• -h, --help - Print help text
• -u, --unload - Attempt to unload Nvidia GPU

*'nvidia-xrun-core' requires root permissions for several key commands such as loading/unloading Nvidia kernel modules

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NOTE: Turning Nvidia GPU off is not possible always, mostly because of interrupted nvidia-xrun commands. If you encounter this issue, run nvidia-xrun -u or nvidia-xrun --unload to turn off your NVIDIA GPU.

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Fork updates

This fork of nvidia-xrun has been revamped. It has some features the original Witko/nvidia-xrun has not:

• Run nvidia-xrun [app] in any terminal and in any TTY session

  • Both graphical & command line environments are supported

    • If executed in a graphical environment, nvidia-xrun finds a free TTY for Nvidia GPU, and gives clear instructions how to switch between TTYs

    • If executed in a command line environment, nvidia-xrun launches the program of your choise in the current TTY using Nvidia GPU

The following parts are not well supported by this fork:

• Dry-run support is removed. Maybe added later.

• Not good support for user-specific .nvidia-xinitrc files

Additional requirements - ttyecho

The forked nvidia-xrun depends on ttyecho program.

You can find ttyecho in subfolder 'ttyecho', included in this repository. PKGBUILD script is for Arch Linux and variants.

You should compile ttyecho.c with gcc:

gcc ttyecho.c -o ttyecho

Install compiled ttyecho binary either as a custom package or place it manually in /usr/local/bin/ folder. ttyecho must be found in your PATH.

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Structure

• nvidia-xrun - uses following dir structure:
• /usr/bin/nvidia-xrun - the executable script wrapper
• /usr/bin/nvidia-xrun-core - the executable (core) script
• /usr/bin/ttyecho - ttyecho executable (Execute commands in another TTY session)
• /etc/X11/nvidia-xorg.conf - the main X confing file
• /etc/X11/xinit/nvidia-xinitrc - xinitrc config file. Contains the setting of provider output source
• /etc/X11/xinit/nvidia-xinitrc.d - custom xinitrc scripts directory
• /etc/X11/nvidia-xorg.conf.d - custom X config directory
• /usr/share/xsessions/nvidia-xrun-openbox.desktop - xsession file for openbox
• /usr/share/xsessions/nvidia-xrun-plasma.desktop - xsession file for plasma
• /etc/sudoers.d/nvidia-xrun-sudoers - sudoers override for nvidia-xrun to run it without password
• [OPTIONAL] ~/.nvidia-xinitrc - user-level custom xinit script file. You can put here your favourite window manager for example

Setting the right bus id

Usually the 1:0:0 bus is correct. If this is not your case(you can find out through lspci or bbswitch output mesages) you can create a conf script for example nano /etc/X11/nvidia-xorg.conf.d/30-nvidia.conf to set the proper bus id:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    Driver "nvidia"
    BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
EndSection

You can use this command to get the bus id:

lspci | grep -i nvidia | awk '{print $1}'

Also this way you can adjust some nvidia settings if you encounter issues:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    Device "nvidia"
    #  Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration" "Yes"
    #  Option "UseDisplayDevice" "none"
EndSection

Obsolete for now

## Automatically run window manager For convenience you can create `nano ~/.nvidia-xinitrc` and put there your favourite window manager:

if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    $*
else
    openbox-session
#   startkde
fi

With this you do not need to specify the app and you can simply run:

nvidia-xrun

## Aur package The aur package can be found here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-xrun/

COPR Repo for Fedora 27+

To Install from COPR

• dnf copr enable axeld/nvidia-xrun
• dnf install nvidia-xrun

OBS Repo for OpenSUSE, Fedora 27+ and RHEL7

The OBS Repo can be found here

Troubleshooting

Steam issues

Yes unfortunately running Steam directly with nvidia-xrun does not work well - I recommend to use some window manager like openbox.

HiDPI issue

When using openbox on a HiDPI (i.e. 4k) display, everything could be so small that is difficult to read. To fix, you can change the DPI settings in ~./Xresources file by adding/changing Xft.dpi setting. For example :

Xft.dpi: 192

nouveau driver conflict

nouveau driver should be automatically blacklisted by nvidia but in case it is not, nvidia might not get access to GPU. Then you need to manually blacklist nouveau following Arch wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_modules#Blacklisting.

avoid nvidia driver to load on boot

nvidia driver may load itself on boot, then nvidia-xrun will fail to start Xorg session. To avoid that, you should blacklist it (see link above). Also sometimes, blacklisting is not enough and you should use some hack to really avoid it to load. For example, adding install nvidia /bin/false to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf will make every load to fail. In that case, you should add --ignore-install to modprobe calls in nvidia-xrun script.