I switched to Ubuntu Linux for the time being

I see, so far the GPUs Intel are developing seems good, I wouldn’t mind to get them to replace NVIDIA’s if they have a better price/performance ratio (like, I don’t care about brands, I just stick to whatever offers a better product lol). More competition is always welcome, not only because companies do some actual effort to offer better products, but also because people has more to choose from regarding budgets, features, etc.

Anyway, regarding swupd here, I’m not sure if it’s possible, but rather than maintaining NVIDIA’s driver compatibility… some workaround could be, like, blacklisting directories/files? So swupd doesn’t touch them while updating and repairing, since I read the docs and it says that with updates there is a risk that you have to reinstall NVIDIA’s drivers manually.

I for example have some modules disabled/blacklisted in my CL installation such as Intel’s Management Engine Interface, since it gives ugly errors at boot saying that couldn’t be enabled or something like that anyway. Maybe something similar for this can be done? Where you say to swupd what stuff should ignore so it doesn’t break NVIDIA’s stuff?

1 Like

The issue is solved using New NVIDIA driver automation.

/usr/bin/nvidia-modprobe
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib64/dri/(nvdec|nvidia|vdpau)_drv_video.so
/usr/lib64/nvidia
/usr/lib/nvidia
/usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/[0-9].*
/usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-.*.service
/usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep
/usr/share/(egl|glvnd|nvidia)

The swupd tool also restores mesa libGL files depending on the bundle being installed or updated or dependencies. The fix trigger script handles that to include calling depmod and ldconfig.

Update on August 4, 2022:
Added /usr/lib64/dri/(nvdec|nvidia|vdpau)_drv_video.so

  • Regarding depmod in trigger script, see issue 2690.
  • Regarding ldconfig in trigger script, see issue 2696.
1 Like

Amazing! So, if I understand correctly, then there is no more isues with NVIDIA’s drivers on CL right? No more issues with OS updates breaking the drivers and the like?
If that’s the case then I can definitely switch to Linux on my PC that has a NVIDIA card!

I’m curious about something though, I recall than on Windows I was capable of having both my Intel iGPU and NVIDIA GPU active at the same time, for example, I could have Adobe Premiere Pro use the NVIDIA GPU to accelerate effects in the video workflow [Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)] and then for rendering I could use my Intel iGPU to handle the task via Intel QuickSync (or sometimes both will work at the same time for rendering, alongside the CPU).

I’m not a very advanced user, but since the NVIDIA Driver replaces the Mesa stuff… will this mean that only the NVIDIA GPU will be used on Linux and the Intel iGPU will become incompatible? Say… I won’t be able to use it in Handbrake for example? No OpenCL for the Intel iGPU?

Thanks!

2 Likes

The swupd tool combined with the ignore list and trigger script no longer breaks the NVIDIA installation (since CL 36740). No problem either for minor kernel updates. If something goes wrong (e.g. updating to next major kernel version - not yet tested), the nvidia-driver-on-clear-linux repo provides a script check-kernel-dkms.

Install CL 36740 or newer. Preferably, choose the lts kernel during installation – it’s at kernel 5.15 now (lts2021). Testing is feasible to an external USB drive so not breaking your daily environment. Be sure to add a user during installation with administrator privilege. The text GUI OS installer takes a bit getting used to. Basically, scroll up or down to see all the options. There is a 2nd tab for advanced options.

For other questions, unfortunately I do not know as unable to test NVIDIA and Intel iGPU combination. The following are the steps I take using NVIDIA graphics. I’m up and running in no time.

Install CL 36740 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/marioroy/nvidia-driver-on-clear-linux
cd nvidia-driver-on-clear-linux
bash pre-install-driver
reboot

cd nvidia-driver-on-clear-linux
bash install-driver 515
reboot

Enable hardware acceleration (note that this has sudo in the command).

cd nvidia-driver-on-clear-linux/HWAccel
sudo bash build-all

cp firefox/firefox.conf ~/.config/.
review Firefox settings as described in the documentation
restart Firefox

Update on August 4, 2022: I tried the above instructions, installing CL 35740 from scratch. I needed to add one more bundle to the 000-install-dependencies script. Otherwise, the steps went flawlessly.

1 Like

Handbrake does AV1 encoding through QuickSync on Linux : Handbrake AV1 solution

Linux install : GitHub - oneapi-src/oneVPL-intel-gpu


And then there’s Intel Deep Link :

2 Likes

One can configure the VA environment variable per each application.

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD application1 ...
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau or nvidia application2 ...
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvdec used by Firefox
1 Like