primus: fatal: Bumblebee daemon reported: error: Could not load GPU driver

Question

I recently installed Ubuntu 14.04 and then installed bumblebee following the instructions on Ubuntu Bumblebee wiki(where they said that primusrun is better than optirun for version=> 13.10) But when I rebooted and tried to run primusrun with any applications (except google-chrome and firefox) the following error came(and comes):

primus: fatal: Bumblebee daemon reported: error: Could not load GPU driver

And surprisingly when I check the status of my nvidia driver, it gets on after running for example

primusrun clementine
sudo cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch

gives the following

0000:01:00.0 ON

Then, in order to avoid powerloss, I have to switch it off by bbswitch

NOTE: I was able to turn it off using bbswitch only after I set Driver=nouveau in the /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf file and rebooted it.

Solution 1

I had the same problem.

I solved changing some lines in file /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf: (In my case I'm using the version 352 of nvidia driver, change this value by your driver version)

1. KernelDriver=nvidia-current to KernelDriver=nvidia-352

2. LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current to LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352:/usr/lib32/nvidia-352

3. XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules to XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules

After that restart the system or restart the bumblebee service with:

sudo systemctl restart bumblebeed.service

To check the service status:

sudo systemctl status bumblebeed.service

and you can check the log in /var/log/syslog file for any error.

Regards

Solution 2

new update: as I thought, changing just one line in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf actually worked out: I got everything working perfectly on updated LMDE 201403 (debian jessie based) by just adding some code to KernelDriver line. Before editing, it was like:

KernelDriver=nvidia

I just added -current to it. This is line now:

KernelDriver=nvidia-current

Now works fine with primusrun glxgears and optirun glxgears. Haven't checked with anything else, have no time currently. Hope this helped, cheers. :D

EDIT: Reason why bumblebee fails and "cannot find driver" is because of incorrect paths to nvidia driver libraries. What I do right now to make bumblebee work with any driver version I wish is changing following lines in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf file:

1. line 22: Driver=nvidia
2. line 55: KernelDriver=nvidia-_version_, i.e. nvidia-352
3. lines 58, 61: these lines contain paths to nvidia libraries and xorg modules. Paths probably start with /usr/lib/nvidia, /usr/lib32/nvidia, or /usr/lib/xorg. You should replace nvidia with nvidia-_version_, i.e. /usr/lib/nvidia-352. Pay attention: each line contains 2 paths, separated by colon or by comma. You should make changes to each path (DO NOT edit path that starts with /usr/lib/xorg).

Note that if you want to use default drivers, _version_ should be current, i.e. line 52: KernelDriver=nvidia-current. I think that bumblebee comes preconfigured to use nvidia-current when package bumblebee-nvidia is installed (sudo apt-get install bumblebee-nvidia).

If done correctly, bumblebee should not report error finding drivers - this worked for me with numerous driver versions.

Comments

[Eliah Kagan]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.

[Bill McCracken]

This worked for me. Note that you have to "sudo systemctl restart bumblebeed" after changing the configuration files.