Notebook with Nvidia Quadro graphics card

[Lorenzo Lamas]

Hi,

I may buy a notebook for Qubes with integrated Intel HD graphics 4600, but it also comes with a Nvidia Quadro graphics card. Will that be a problem for Qubes? Is there someway I can force it to use the integrated graphics to avoid problems?

[brenda...@gmail.com]

Older laptops w/ Optimus allowed choosing Integrated-only video (vs hybrid or vs Discrete). I set up my W520 w/ the Integrated intel cpu and it has been a workhorse.

Contemporary laptops w/ Optimus only allow Hybrid or Discrete. No way to choose just Integrated. Qubes 4.0 and lower don’t handle this very well w/o a lot of boot parameter fiddling and custom X config.

However...

I just tested a test build (20191227) of R4.1 using Fedora 31 dom0 and 5.4 kernel on a Thinkpad P52 (2018 model w/ Optimus on a Quadra P3200). Other than a bit of blind navigation during the first boot part of the install (and some strategic Bios settings such as setting discrete graphics), it installed ok. Changing screen resolution results in a black screen (fixed via ctrl-alt-f2 then ctrl-alt-f1).

Probably would work much better after installing nvidia drivers via rpmfusion-nonfree. But not unusable.

B

[Lorenzo Lamas]

Thanks for the reply. Do you know when the option to only use integrated graphics was removed? The models i’m looking at are 4th gen i7 CPU’s with Quadro K1100M/1200M. Unfortunately, a lot of business laptops have changed to prefer sleek design over performance, and use the slower U versions of Intel CPU’s. The ones that do have a proper CPU usually also have a discrete Nvidia or AMD graphics card.