Installing Nvidia driver for GeForce 310m on Fedora 24 with bumblebee-nvidia

My Asus U36JC notebook contains both Intel integrated graphics and an Nvidia GeForce 310M. Here are the results from lspci:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18)
...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218M [GeForce 310M] (rev ff)

This notebook supports Nvidia's Optimus, which switches between integrated Intel video and the discrete Nvidia card depending on the computing task. For 3D-intensive workloads, the Nvidia card should be used. While this works OOTB on Windows 7+, on Linux you must do the switching manually. One project that makes this possible is Bumblebee. When you want to launch a certain program with the discrete Nvidia card, you simply prefix the program launch command with optirun.

I tried the open-source nouveau driver for my Nvidia GeForce 310M but I found the frame rate lacking when playing games so I switched to using Nvidia's proprietary driver. When you are searching for the Nvidia Linux driver for an older video card, DO NOT go to the main page for your video card and download drivers from there; if you do that, you will only be able to find old drivers for Linux kernel 2.4.X and 2.6.X, and these drivers are incompatible with Fedora 24 (which as of Nov. 13, 2016 is at 4.8.6.-201.fc24.x86_64)

Instead, to download the newest proprietary Nvidia Linux driver blobs, you must go to the following link and find your card:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

Then you can download the appropriate driver from the following link:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

For my Nvidia GeForce 310M, the latest proprietary driver as of Nov. 13, 2016 is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.98 which can be downloaded from here:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/107868/en-us

Now it's time to install Bumblebee. I added the following repos for Bumblebee with Nvidia closed-source driver and unmanaged Nvidia Fedora repo:

dnf -y --nogpgcheck install http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee/fedora24/noarch/bumblebee-release-1.2-1.noarch.rpm

dnf -y --nogpgcheck install http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee-nonfree-unmanaged/fedora24/noarch/bumblebee-nonfree-unmanaged-release-1.2-1.noarch.rpm

I then installed the following:

dnf install bumblebee-nvidia bbswitch-dkms VirtualGL.x86_64 VirtualGL.i686 primus.x86_64 primus.i686 kernel-devel

Now copy the Nvidia binary blob which you downloaded earlier (it has the extension .run) into /etc/sysconfig/nvidia and then execute the following:

$ sudo bumblebee-nvidia --debug
[sudo] password for fedjun:
--debug mode selected.
Building NVIDIA video drivers: Creating directory NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-340.98
Verifying archive integrity... OK
Uncompressing NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for Linux-x86_64 340.98.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
  [  OK  ]

You may be prompted to manually build bbswitch using DKMS during the installation. Note you will have to manually rebuild your Nvidia driver using the above command every time your kernel is upgraded. Once you build the driver, you may have to restart your machine to get bumblebeed to work.

Now make sure bumblebeed is running:

[fedjun@u36jcFedora nvidia]$ systemctl status bumblebeed
● bumblebeed.service - Bumblebee C Daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/bumblebeed.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2016-11-12 09:21:47 KST; 24s ago
 Main PID: 20004 (bumblebeed)
    Tasks: 1 (limit: 512)
   CGroup: /system.slice/bumblebeed.service
           └─20004 /usr/sbin/bumblebeed

Nov 12 09:21:47 u36jcFedora systemd[1]: Started Bumblebee C Daemon.
Nov 12 09:21:47 u36jcFedora bumblebeed[20004]: [ 2077.225663] [INFO]/usr/sbin/bumblebeed 3.2.1 started

Finally, test that glxgears runs with your Nvidia card:

$ optirun glxgears

You should see an OpenGL window appear with 3 rotating gears. Press ESC to exit the window.

When I play Pillars of Eternity 3.03, I launch the game as follows:

$ optirun ./start.sh

I get much better frame rates when using the Nvidia discrete video card with this game.

References:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/814