Bumblebee

Description

Bumblebee is a tool for managing discrete graphics cards on laptops. There has been several attempts in the past but the latest project is working on a more complete solution. It comes in a few parts this page currently only deals with the bbswitch tool which allows the discrete card to be disabled and save battery life.

This is not a complete guide, this only provides an outline of what needs to be done in order to have Nvidia optimus working with nouveau. Fedora does not support NVidia blob, for information on how to use the nvidia blob with Bumblebee in Fedora 16 Click Here.

Install Dependencies

yum install -y libbsd-devel libbsd glibc-devel libX11-devel help2man autoconf git tar glib2 glib2-devel kernel-devel kernel-headers automake gcc

You also need to install VirtualGL. Download the latest version for your arch at [1]

Install Bumblebee

Download the latest source from github.

git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee.git
cd Bumblebee

Create the install files.

autoreconf -fi
./configure --prefix=/opt/bumblebee
make

Install it:

sudo make install

You will also need to create relevant users and groups:

sudo groupadd bumblebee
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER

You can get help by running --help on either binaries.

Enable bumblebee in systemd

If you want bumblebeed to start up on system boot, enable it in systemd:

sudo cp scripts/systemd/bumblebeed.service /lib/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable bumblebeed.service

Install bbswitch - without dkms

Download the latest source from github.

git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch.git
cd bbswitch

Create the install files and load in to the kernel.

make
sudo make load

This obviously needs to be loaded into the kernel every time and rebuilt manually with every kernel update. If you don't want to do that, use the 'Install bbswitch - with dkms' section below instead

Install bbswitch - with dkms

sudo yum install dkms
git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch.git
BBSWITCHVERSION=$(grep MODULE_VERSION bbswitch.c|awk -F\" '{print $2}')
sudo mv bbswitch /usr/src/bbswitch-$BBSWITCHVERSION
sudo dkms add -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION
sudo dkms build -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION
sudo dkms install -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION

Usage

Now to run bumblebee:

sudo systemctl start bumblebeed.service
/opt/bumblebee/bin/optirun -- <application>