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I own an Asus Rog Strix Scar III - model G531GV which runs a side by side installation of Parrot OS together with the already installed Windows 10 OS.

After a lot of struggle and numerous hard resets, I managed to configure Bumblebee up to the point that optirun/primusrun commands work as they should, use machine's GPU, and when the command completes bbswitch kicks in and completely powers off GPU, that way power management support is in place.

cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch -> 0000:01:00.0 OFF

While that's what I wanted to accomplish in the first place I soon realized that while GPU is powered off by bbswitch, any GPU related commands like:

nvidia-smi
lspci -k

etc, completely freeze my computer. The cursor stops responding, no shortcut that could drop me into any kind of TTY sessions work, and in general nothing works besides powering off the machine through power button. Moreover, I can't even check what is getting recorded in syslog regarding this error since nothing is there when I reboot the computer.

My system specifics are the following:

    Laptop model       : Asus Rog Strix Scar III - G531GV
    Installed OS       : Parrot 4.9 64-bit (full updated)
    Kernel             : Linux 5.5.0-1parrot1-amd64 x86_64
    Nvidia Gpu         : RTX-2060 6GB
    Nvidia-Drivers     : Latest - Proprietary 440.82
    Bumblebeed Version : 3.2.1

I would be more than happy to issue any requested commands to finally overcome this nightmare. I've gone through numerous posts and tried many different things like grub parameters but nothing seems to make a difference. I'm really stuck at this point for more than ten days or so.

Thank you all in advance.

1 Answer 1

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You need to make sure that you

rmmod nvidia

before you power off the GPU using bbswitch.

You also need to:

optirun nvidia-smi

or

optirun lspci -k

You should be able to alias it in your .bashrc

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  • Hello Gordan Bobic, thank you a lot for your fast reply. I just tried: sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<ON to power up nvidia so i could try what you suggested. Then I issued sudo rmmod nvidia and result of this command was: rmmod: ERROR: Module nvidia is not currently loaded. I believe that any nvidia modules are unloaded as they should otherwise bbswitch would complain about not being able to power of the GPU. May 24, 2020 at 23:20
  • Fair enough. I suspect you are out of luck, then. The problem comes down to the fact that the Nvidia device is present enough to show it's device ID and the functionality required to power it up, and not present enough to actually do anything more than that. So the programs in question detect it, then find out the hard way that it is unresponsive. I seem to recall seeing a problem like this on 10xx and later series GPUs. I can't reproduce it on my 970M, that just errors out on the device. Presumably Nvidia implemented extra power savings since and the price to pay is the behaviour you see. May 24, 2020 at 23:38
  • Added a workaround method to the original answer. May 24, 2020 at 23:42
  • Wow i just realized that primusrun lspci -k and primusrun nvidia-smi both freeze my computer as well while GPU is powered off through bbswitch.. Thats something i get to know for the first time. Now the strange part is that optirun lspci -k and optirun nvidia-smi both work as expected. Moreover, any command executes successfully when nvidia is powered up. I'm really confused.. May 25, 2020 at 0:13
  • Quick Update: primusrun glxgears and optirun glxgears, execute as expected May 25, 2020 at 0:26

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