Re: Requesting maintainer access - adding Bumblebee packages

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 17:09, Anssi Hannula <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 18.01.2012 12:49, Jaron Viëtor wrote:
>> As for nvidia support - this should "just work"! Simply install the
>> nvidia drivers from the Mandriva repository and that should be it!
>> Upon installation, the bumblebee package runs:
>> update-alternatives --set gl_conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/GL/standard.conf
>
>> You may have to do this manually if you (re)install the nvidia drivers
>> after bumblebee.
>
> This shouldn't be needed, though, since the alternative state is kept.

Yes, I was hoping for that to be true, but wasn't sure :-) Thanks for
confirming that!

>
>> If you encounter any problems with this configuration, be sure to let
>> me know and I'll help you get it working properly.
>
> Quickly glancing over the files, this seems like a relatively well
> structured project instead of quick hacks that would disrupt package
> management or configuration tools, so thank you for that :)

Thanks, we spend a lot of time trying to do things properly with this version!

>
> I'm interested in bringing Optimus support to Mageia if I have the time
> (possibly even out-of-the-box when a supported system is detected),
> however, I'd like to know more about some things:
>
> - If the user doesn't use 'optirun' and thus the optimus device is not
>  used, is the power usage lower than before bumblebeed was installed,
>  or just the same? I.e. does installing bumblebeed already have
>  power saving benefits, or is it just that fact the device is
>  automatically downpowered when not in use?
>  (sorry, couldn't phrase it better)

Yes. The daemon powers the GPU down while not in use, so not using it
means always powered down.
On my own laptop this means about 2 hours of extra battery time, but
YMMV of course.

>
> - How reliable is it (if you know)? Also, does it work equally well with
>  both nouveau and NVIDIA driver?

Both drivers have been tested quite extensively and both seem to
perform very well and are stable.
The 2.99 version is somewhat of a pre-release, I'll update it to 3.0
as soon as it is finalized (should be *very* soon now), one of the
issues this update will "fix" is a bug of some sort in the nvidia
driver: it seems to sometimes re-load itself when the card is powered
down (seems to be triggered by some browsers, among other tings),
which corrupts the state of the device. The 3.0 version automatically
restores the device state if/when this happens.
Other than that, it has been found to be very stable by all people
that have done regular tests. I've personally been running this 24/7
for a few weeks on my machine and haven't had a single crash (besides
the nvidia state corruption problem, which doesn't really crash
anything but causes optirun to fail until the state is restored).

>
> - Do you have some list of supported devices that could be used for
>  automatic detection, or do you recommend something else?

I'd advice you talk to Lekensteyn (one of the other developers). He's
done the work on the kernel module that does most of the device
detection. He can probably help you put something together that can
reliably detect supported devices. He usually hangs out in
#bumblebee-dev on irc.freenode.net (as do I, by the way).

>
> - Does it work relatively equally well on all laptops, or are there some
>  quirks?

It's been confirmed to work with several cases of both "old-style" and
"new-style" Optimus laptops. Of course we don't own every single
Optimus laptop that's made, and can't guarantee 100% compatibility,
but from the first reports of users it seems to be pretty damn close.

>
> (I kept this post in cooker@ since this information might be useful for
> others here as well)
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Anssi Hannula


If you do end up adding support for Mageia, let me or another
developer know and we'll make sure to update our list of supported
distributions and/or will include links to (your) instructions on how
to install/setup everything on it.