I have an Alienware 15R2 with Skylake integrated graphics and NVIDIA GTX 970M discrete graphics in an Optimus configuration.
maxtothemax@maxtothemax-mint ~ $ inxi -xxx -G
Graphics: Card-1: Intel Skylake Integrated Graphics bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:191b
Card-2: NVIDIA GM204M [GeForce GTX 970M] bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:13d8
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.3 driver: nvidia Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz, 1920x1080@60.02hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 970M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 361.42 Direct Rendering: Yes
maxtothemax@maxtothemax-mint ~ $
I have proprietary drivers installed through driver-manager, since I failed to get Optimus working right when I tried installing the driver manually. I do not have any PRIME or other offloading system installed, I just restart the X server to go between Intel and NVIDIA mode. (EDIT: my bad, I am using PRIME for this.) Everything basically works, and the 3D performance is good, but there are a couple of problems. A minor niggle is that the HDMI output on the laptop only works in NVIDIA mode, never in Intel mode. But the big problem is that when in NVIDIA mode using a dual-monitor configuration, the Xinerama monitor data presented to applications is somehow garbled. The attached screenshot was taken with a dual-monitor configuration enabled. You can see that:
- [*]The laptop's built-in monitor doesn't show up in the "nvidia-settings" program at all, making it impossible to use that program to configure a dual-monitor setup. It doesn't show up in the "Selection" drop-down menu, although that's hard to screenshot. Clicking "Detect Displays" does not detect the built-in monitor either.
[*]The two monitors show up just fine in the "mate-display-properties" program, and that's how I was able to disable mirror mode and configure my dual monitor setup.
[*]Despite there being two monitors running, The Xinerama data only shows a single "head."
This last point is the most problematic one. It means that every window manager I’ve tried-- marco, openbox, etc.-- is confused. I can drag windows between my monitors just fine, and resize them just fine, but when I maximize a window, it always jumps to the external monitor, even if it was on my laptop monitor. Furthermore, lots of games (for example Mute Crimson+ on Steam) are confused and will refuse to fullscreen or even refuse to start.
I was able to reproduce this issue using the NVIDIA 352.x proprietary driver packaged in Linux Mint 17.3/Ubuntu 14.04, and also using the NVIDIA 361.42 driver from Mint 18/16.04, which I’m running now (with the 64-bit 4.4.0-14 generic kernel. I also wasn’t able to find any similar bug reports to this in my googling.
Let me know if there’s any additional troubleshooting I can do or information I can provide, as this is a very annoying issue.
Thanks,
-Max Eliaser.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (220 KB)