Leap 42.3 Optimus laptop - bumblebee - Chapter 2

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

HEllo.
First Happy new year to everybody.

Thanks to the guidance collected in a previous thread ( http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/528211-Leap-42-3-Optimus-laptop-nvidia-prime-bumblebee ) I tried with success to install and run optimus, bumblebee, and the nvidia driver ( installed via ‘http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers#Easy_way_to_get_NVIDIA_drivers’).

For not forgetting a step I wrote a script to do the job : http://paste.opensuse.org/78380357 .

Now the time is going to come where it will be necessary for me to update the nvidia driver and\or the kernel (If it was not already done automatically.).

If somebody could give me some piece of advice on the pocedure to be followed.

At the moment, neither dkms nor dkms-nvidia are installed.
But reading again ‘https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_Bumblebee’ in the Tumbleweed section it is said to install dkms .

I run also virtualbox.

What happens for all the kernel modules which normally must be reinstalled/update/compiled.

Any help is welcome.

# uname -a
Linux linux-u6go 4.4.104-39-default #1 SMP Thu Jan 4 08:11:03 UTC 2018 (7db1912) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# systemctl status dkms.service
● dkms.service
   Loaded: not-found (Reason: No such file or directory)
   Active: inactive (dead)

# rpm -qa | grep dkms

# rpm -qa | grep nvidia
nvidia-computeG04-384.98-29.1.x86_64
nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default-384.98_k4.4.76_1-29.1.x86_64
x11-video-nvidiaG04-384.98-29.1.x86_64
nvidia-glG04-384.98-29.1.x86_64

# rpm -qa | grep bumblebee
bumblebee-3.2.1-13.18.x86_64

# rpm -qa | grep bbswitch
bbswitch-kmp-default-0.8_k4.4.76_1-11.19.x86_64
bbswitch-0.8-11.19.x86_64
#2

How exactly updating is different from installing? You just perform the same steps you did when you installed it. If you did not use DKMS why would you suddenly need it?

#3

I need nothing.

Reading again the SDB, in Tumbleweed section the I just found this :

Install the driver:
sudo zypper in nvidia-bumblebee nvidia-bumblebee-32bit
**sudo systemctl enable dkms**

So I was wondering if it is usefull or not , mandatory or not , to enable dkms .

From my point of view I was thinking that just upgrading only the nvidia driver would be sufficient without reinstalling everythings. Is it ?

#4

I do not know what “reinstalling everything” means, but you will need to blacklist kernel module again as well as remove nVidia libraries.

#5

Thank you very much for helping.

#6

Hi, if you have a working Bumblebee don’t try to break it by mixing advice for Tumbleweed which has a different procedure for installing proprietary drivers.
Apparently you installed the driver by installing nvidia-glG04-384.98-29.1.x86_64 and the corresponding kernel modules by installing nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default-384.98_k4.4.76_1-29.1.x86_64
With that setup dkms is not needed: if and when an update to the driver and/or to the kernel should be needed, those packages should be updated by the ordinary update process (“zypper up” or whatever you ordinarily use).
Those updates should not be too frequent with Leap, so relax and enjoy your system; should you meet with problems feel free to ask here on the Forums.

With Tumbleweed kernel updates are almost a weekly issue and the Nvidia modules need to be rebuilt locally on each upgrade, so dkms may be an asset there if you don’t want to rebuild manually; but, as said, this is a different story.
A similar reasoning applies to VirtualBox if you installed the version from the official openSUSE repo.

#7

Noted.
Thank you very much