AMD vis-a-vis NVIDIA GPU

[cubem...@gmail.com]

I have two mostly identical laptops with differing GPU's - one has 16GB RAM and a NVIDIA GPU and the other has twice the RAM and an equivalent AMD GPU (2GB VRAM). They both work great with Qubes with a few issues. The NVIDIA GPU has issues plugging into a docking station, and when so refuses to sleep. Otherwise it works fine, and you get get three monitors off the machine using the docking station.

I tried the AMD expecting it to work flawlessly since AMD has better Linux support but no. It does handle the docking station better, but after about 10 minutes of running the Window manager will crash and not restart. Oddly, when I tried at first with a slow spinner disk (before upgrading to a SSD) the title bars and frame decorations of windows would garble - permanently. That is, even on the next boot. Why does the window manager (which are we using?) hate AMD so much?

Separately a small issue with 32GB RAM, usually when starting a VM it complains of not having enough RAM! Fortunately if I just retry it will work.

Suggestions?

1. Install a different GPU driver?
   
2. Try a different Window manager or something with that?
   
3. Could the problem be graphics switching between the built in Intel GPU and AMD GPU?

[Vít Šesták]

Hello,

I don't know much about your the GPU issues, but I have some ideas:

1. What drivers do you have? Do you have installed Bumblebee or something similar?
2. You are using KDE, aren't you? In this case, you might want to try to disable desktop effects. Window title » right click » More Actions » Window Manager Settings » Desktop Effects » General » Enable desktop effects at startup. You can also see a keyboard shortcut for toggling them for the current session. I have Alt+Shift+F12 there, but I may have customized it.
3. If you want to try a different WM, there are two WMs officially supported by Qubes: Kwin (from KDE) and Xfwm (from XFCE). As far as I know, there is also some unofficial support for AwesomeWM.
4. Do you really need the dedicated GPUs in dom0? Unless it is required for docking on some other graphical output (which is my case for HDMI), then there is probably no benefit of using dedicated GPU in Qubes. You might try to disable it in BIOS (if supported) or in OS. For Nvidia, I have successfully disabled the dedicated GPU by Bumblebee. For AMD, I have no experience with dual GPU setup, but there is AFAIR vga_switcheroo for that.

Ad the 32GiB RAM issue: This is likely caused by https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1136 . Try adding dom0_mem=max:4096M to GRUB_CMDLINE_XED_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub. After you do this, you have to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and reboot in order to make it effective.

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

[cubem...@gmail.com]

1. What drivers do you have? Do you have installed Bumblebee or something similar?

Just the default ones that come with Q 3.0
 

2. You are using KDE, aren't you? In this case, you might want to try to disable desktop effects. Window title » right click » More Actions » Window Manager Settings » Desktop Effects » General » Enable desktop effects at startup. You can also see a keyboard shortcut for toggling them for the current session. I have Alt+Shift+F12 there, but I may have customized it.

Hmm, perhaps, I'll try.
 

3. If you want to try a different WM, there are two WMs officially supported by Qubes: Kwin (from KDE) and Xfwm (from XFCE). As far as I know, there is also some unofficial support for AwesomeWM.

I'll try, but I think it's a GPU frag problem
 

4. Do you really need the dedicated GPUs in dom0? Unless it is required for docking on some other graphical output (which is my case for HDMI), then there is probably no benefit of using dedicated GPU in Qubes. You might try to disable it in BIOS (if supported) or in OS. For Nvidia, I have successfully disabled the dedicated GPU by Bumblebee. For AMD, I have no experience with dual GPU setup, but there is AFAIR vga_switcheroo for that.

BIOS has an option to disable automatic graphic switching but not turn off the graphics. I do want to use docking, so yeah ...

Anybody know what the AMD vga_switcheroo flags are to disable the AMD driver?

 

Ad the 32GiB RAM issue: This is likely caused by https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1136 . Try adding dom0_mem=max:4096M to GRUB_CMDLINE_XED_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub. After you do this, you have to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and reboot in order to make it effective.

Good one, thanks!

[Vít Šesták]

Hello,

1. What drivers do you have? Do you have installed Bumblebee or something similar?

Just the default ones that come with Q 3.0

So, you are probably either using only Intel GPU or only Nvidia GPU. In my case, Qubes seems to use Intel GPU by default. I have installed Bumblebee in order to cut power consumption down, because it can shut the NVidia GPU down. If your problem is really caused by Nvidia drivers, then installing Bumblebee is likely to help.
 

2. You are using KDE, aren't you? In this case, you might want to try to disable desktop effects. Window title » right click » More Actions » Window Manager Settings » Desktop Effects » General » Enable desktop effects at startup. You can also see a keyboard shortcut for toggling them for the current session. I have Alt+Shift+F12 there, but I may have customized it.

Hmm, perhaps, I'll try.

This one should make the task for GPU easier.
 

3. If you want to try a different WM, there are two WMs officially supported by Qubes: Kwin (from KDE) and Xfwm (from XFCE). As far as I know, there is also some unofficial support for AwesomeWM.

I'll try, but I think it's a GPU frag problem

 Yes, I think the same. I hope that disabling effects in Kwin will do essentially the same for this issue as using Xfwm, but you might try both.

 

I do want to use docking, so yeah ...

Note that some (older?) systems require the dedicated GPU for some outputs, but some (newer?) systems have multiple graphical outputs from the integrated GPU, so dedicated GPU is not required for those outputs.

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

[cubem...@gmail.com]

So, you are probably either using only Intel GPU or only Nvidia GPU. In my case, Qubes seems to use Intel GPU by default. I have installed Bumblebee in order to cut power consumption down, because it can shut the NVidia GPU down. If your problem is really caused by Nvidia drivers, then installing Bumblebee is likely to help.

Can you give me the steps to install Bumblebee? I'll try it.

And, do you know any way to find out or force Qubes to use only the Intel GPU?

 

Note that some (older?) systems require the dedicated GPU for some outputs, but some (newer?) systems have multiple graphical outputs from the integrated GPU, so dedicated GPU is not required for those outputs.

These are new machine (1 year old) with dock stations that are only 3 years old design I believe, but I don't know how they route the graphics.

TIA!

[Vít Šesták]

Ad forcing only Intel GPU: This is exactly what effectively Bumblebee does in Qubes. Well, Bumblebee also allows some GPU switching, but this does not make much sense in Qubes and I don't use it. Note that Bumblebee is designed for Nvidia and does not work with AMD. (Well, at least I am not aware of AMD support in Bumblebee.)

Ad Bumblebee installation: I have shared my experience at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/qubes-users/bumblebee/qubes-users/Ub_ZbOEde44/1a75ITxR_HgJ . You should have better times with getting it working, because both mentioned bugs have been fixed.

There is what I have done (cleaned troubles related to the two fixed bugs):

1. Downloaded http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee/fedora21/noarch/bumblebee-release-1.2-1.noarch.rpm
2. extracted two files from it:
* /etc/yum.repos.d/bumblebee.repo

* /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-bumblebeepublic
3. Verified the files that the key is well known and the *.repo requires GPG key check.
4. Copied the files to their location in Dom0 manually.
5. sudo qubes-dom0-update bumblebee

6. sudo systemctl enable bumblebeed
7. reboot

I've also installed bbswitch, but I think this should be automatically installed as a dependency of Bumblebee. At the linked topic, I also mention installing of TLP. TLP is good for cutting the power consumption down, but probably not related to your problems.

After installation and reboot, you can check the Bumblebee is effective:
* systemctl status bumblebeed should show it is active
* lsmod | grep nvidia should not make any output
* lsmod | grep nou should not make any output

Let me know it the steps above work correctly. If the steps above have worked, I can write some wiki article.

If your machines are 1 year old, there are chances that the Intel GPU can handle three graphical outputs. My older Intel GPU can handle only two graphical outputs (in my case integrated display and SVGA), so the third one (i.e. HDMI in my case) is wired to the Nvidia GPU.

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

[nezn...@xy9ce.tk]

> 1. Downloaded http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee/fedora21/noarch/bumblebee-release-1.2-1.noarch.rpm
> 2. extracted two files from it:
> * /etc/yum.repos.d/bumblebee.repo
> * /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-bumblebeepublic
> 3. Verified the files that the key is well known and the *.repo requires GPG key check.
> 4. Copied the files to their location in Dom0 manually.
> 5. sudo qubes-dom0-update bumblebee
> 6. sudo systemctl enable bumblebeed
> 7. reboot

Hi! I am soooo long time try to solve this problem (optimus).. I found your "how to" and wanna(ed) try again. Again i deleted Windows and install Qubes(500th time) and now i'm again stucked. At the 5th line i get this: goo.gl/TW5Xot
Maybe you know what does it mean? My english (and Linux) is so bad:( But Windows10-paranoia dont give me relax. And i cant understand what i need to do with this error.