Bumblebee Daemon

Bumblebee daemon is a rewrite of the original Bumblebee service, providing an elegant and stable means of managing Optimus hybrid graphics chipsets. A primary goal of this project is to not only enable use of the discrete GPU for rendering, but also to enable smart power management of the dGPU when it's not in use.

Build Requirements

• pkg-config
• autotools (2.68+ recommended)
• glib-2.0 and development headers
• libx11 and development headers
• libbsd and development headers (if pidfile support is enabled, default yes)

Runtime dependencies

If you want to use optirun for running applications with the discrete nVidia card, you will also need:

• virtualgl
• Driver for nvidia graphics card: nouveau or the proprietary nvidia driver. Don't install it directly from nvidia.com as it will break 3D capabilities on the Intel graphics card and therefore affect the display of frames from the nvidia card.

If you want to make use of Power Management, you will need:

• bbswitch
• If you're brave and want to try the switcheroo method, install at least the optimus patch. Note that suspend is not yet supported by this method.

Building

autoreconf -fi
./configure
make

Installing System-wide and Packaging

You can build the binaries and set the system wide paths at configure time

autoreconf -fi
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
make

To set the default driver to nvidia and adjust the library and module paths for it, use ./configure like:

./configure CONF_DRIVER=nvidia CONF_DRIVER_MODULE_NVIDIA=nvidia-current \
  CONF_LDPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current \
  CONF_MODPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules \
  --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc

For all available options, run:

./configure --help

After building the binaries and bash completion script, it can be installed using make:

sudo make install

For packagers you need to add DESTDIR=$pkgdir

make install DESTDIR=$pkgdir

Example initscripts are available in the scripts/ directory. Currently, Upstart, SystemD and SysV initscripts are available

Usage

The first time you install Bumblebee, the bumblebee group has be created. Users who are allowed to use Bumblebee need to be added the group:

sudo groupadd bumblebee
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER

To test Bumblebee before installing it system-wide, run:

sudo bin/bumblebeed --daemon
bin/optirun -- <application>

For more information, try --help on either of the two binaries.