Cuda on an optimus laptop running bumblebee & OpenSuse [SOLVED]

Hi all

I am working on an Alienware M17X which is an optimus technology laptop.

The situation there is the following:

$ optirun inxi -G
Graphics:  Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller 
           Card-2: NVIDIA GF114M [GeForce GTX 675M] 
           X.Org: 1.18.3 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,nv,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1080@60.02hz, 1920x1080@60.00hz 
           GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 675M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 387.34

and

$ uname -a
Linux goldberg 4.14.8-2-default #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 20 10:40:41 UTC 2017 (674981b) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The nvidia driver that I am obliged to use is 387.34 (due to the obligatory presence of bumblebee): the actual package is dkms-nvidia (version 387.34-77.1) from

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/Bumblebee-Project:/nVidia:/latest/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/

similar bumblebee compliance obligations prevent me to install

nvidia-computeG04
nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default
nvidia-glG04
x11-video-nvidiaG04

or, my laptop fails to boot to the graphics environment.

Cuda installs smoothly and

deviceQuery

finds the nvidia graphics card but then almost none of the samples execute successfully (especially those cuBLAS and other math libraries).

Any ideas?

mimis

The GF114M in that laptop is getting pretty old now. Depending on which CUDA version you installed (if it is 9.0 or 9.1) that GPU is not supported.

Furthermore, there may be issues with linux kernels after 4.10 and drivers older than r390 branch drivers.

My suggestion would be to downgrade that to a 4.10 kernel version, and install CUDA 8.

Thank you txbob

I will try a previous version and an older kernel.

mimis

Well I am reporting success:

[a] kernel was downgraded:

$ uname -r
4.4.104-18.44-default

and

cuda-repo-opensuse132-8-0-local-ga2-8.0.61-1.x86_64.rpm

was used (although I am running OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 and not 13.2)

things run smoothly now!

A great many thanks :-)

mimis