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I updated from using Bumblebee/primus on 14.04 LTS where everything worked, to a fresh install of 16.04 and it seems like bit of a trainwreck. My machine boots correctly, just not actually using the nvidia card.

I initially tried running bumblebee, and failed. Reading through various comments it seems that bumblebee is relatively unsupported and most people are using nvidia-prime.

I uninstalled the bumblee and primus packages and installed nvidia-prime. When I tried running nvidia-settings I got this message: 

** Message: PRIME: No offloading required. Abort
** Message: PRIME: is it supported? no

ERROR: nvidia-settings could not find the registry key file. This file should have been installed along with this driver at
       /usr/share/nvidia/nvidia-application-profiles-key-documentation. The application profiles will continue to work, but values cannot be
       prepopulated or validated, and will not be listed in the help text. Please see the README for possible values and descriptions.

It also wasn't showing any signs of having found an Nvidia card, and no way to switch profiles. I then found the following article on getting bumblebee running after all, so I followed the directions here:

http://lenovolinux.blogspot.pe/2016/05/bumblebee-on-lenovo-t440p-nvidia-gt.html?m=1

Everything seems to work smoothly until I actually tried running a GLX app: 

optirun glxgears
[ 2421.220634] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) 

[ 2421.220707] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

So I checked the actual bus id:

sudo nano -w  /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia

and it was correctly set. I suspect that my card wasn't supported in the nvidia-361 drivers, but I'm not sure if it is really an issue, since I then downgraded and am now using the nvidia-340 driver.

After going through everything I could find, I now get a different message:

[74727.192809] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) 

[74727.192873] [WARN]The Bumblebee server was not available.

Here's the pastebin of the bumblebee-bugreporting tool: http://pastebin.com/fu0F2Zse

MrMowgli
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  • According to Nvidia the only drivers versions supporting your card are: 352, 361, 367 and 370 (currently beta). And you should remove all traces of the previously installed drivers before trying a new one. And yes, bumblebee is deprecated. Simply installing the correct Nvidia driver should also bring nvidia-prime. –  Oct 20 '16 at 15:04
  • Hrmm I can try switching back again, however I spent a good week trying everything I could for the 361. Out of curiosity, where did you find the driver support info, the nvidia website? – MrMowgli Oct 20 '16 at 23:42
  • Yes, geforce.com (also accessible from nvidia.com) –  Oct 21 '16 at 00:30
  • I updated to 367, and in fact it didn't work. Same issues. Then after an update it also blank screened on me, trying to load the nvidia drivers even though I blacklisted them. I ended up also reinstalling nvidia-prime and running `prime-select intel` to get back my Unity session. – MrMowgli Nov 09 '16 at 03:08
  • I eventually installed nvidia-prime again, and now I can session from one card or the other at boot. Nvidia performance was awful though. – MrMowgli Jan 03 '17 at 20:39

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