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A comment on Pop OS – System76. Parent comment

Re:Pop OS – System76 by nybble41 on Monday October 18, 2021 @02:23PM (#28909216)
I have a 14" System76 Gazelle running Debian with hybrid graphics through primus-vk-nvidia[0] and the proprietary drivers and I would say it works fairly well, albeit only after a substantial amount of trial-and-error with the configuration to make it stable. (Most notably, I blacklisted the bbswitch driver since it tended to cause lockups—the system seems to work just fine without it.) Most applications rely exclusively on the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU but I can add a "pvkrun" prefix to any command to have it render on the discrete GTX 1660 Ti and copy the image data back to the iGPU for display. I haven't fully optimized the power consumption, but the driver for the NVIDIA card is unloaded when not in use so the discrete graphics should be completely idle.

I haven't used Pop!_OS much lately, but from what I remember at the time I received the system with Pop!_OS preinstalled there were options in the main menu (alongside shut down / reboot) to switch between integrated and discrete graphics. The change involved a system reboot, and there wasn't any support for hybrid graphics.

[0] https://packages.debian.org/sid/primus-vk-nvidia

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Re:Pop OS – System76 by matheusmoreira on Monday October 18, 2021 @04:51PM (#28911549)
> primus-vk-nvidia

This is new to me! I'll try it out one of these days. Last time I dealt with this stuff bumblebee was still in use. There was also a hack to spawn a second hardware-accelerated X server.

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Re:Pop OS – System76 by nybble41 on Monday October 18, 2021 @05:07PM (#28911769)
> Last time I dealt with this stuff bumblebee was still in use.

The primus-vk-nvidia stack still uses Bumblebee. It replaces the original PRIMUS component with a version that shares the image data through the Vulkan APIs, which seems to have fewer issues with incompatible OpenGL versions (even when both the app and the compositor are using OpenGL and not Vulkan). Perhaps something about Vulkan being designed from the start to support multiple vendor backends in the same process, vs. OpenGL where you generally have to load a single vendor's implementation?

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