Easily Swap Between AMD & NVIDIA OpenGL Linux Drivers At Boot Time

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Easily Swap Between AMD & NVIDIA OpenGL Linux Drivers At Boot Time

For benchmarkers, or distributions that ship the closed source drivers, it might be a pain to constantly be swapping between the two closed source drivers. It would appear that one developer was annoyed by this enough to try and create a solution. Meet: gpu-driver-swap by mikeanthonywild...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-GPU-Driver-Swap

[uid313]

This is supposed to just work without a hitch.
X.Org supports auto-detection of hardware.
So swap between graphics card works when using the open source device drivers.

The problem is that Nvidia proprietary drivers overrides libglx.so (or something, I forgot) with their own modified version.
And so does the AMD proprietary drivers.
So they are not compatible with each other.

[duby229]

That's not really a problem for gentoo or arch users. Gentoo at least has had eselect to switch opengl profiles for a long time. I had always assumed Fedora and Ubuntu and the rest must have had similar tools too.

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, speaking of which, how is progress on that NVIDIA initiative to solve this in a clean fashion, so that nobody overrides any .so files?

[Trevelyan]

I would much rather that libglvnd catches on; so that all the drivers can live together:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd

Are there no updates about plans to adopt it?

Surely something that enables co-operation and coexistence is better than pretending other GL implementations don't exist? Regardless what you think about each camp.

[orome]

This should have been udev action instead of some weird boot time scripting

[duby229]

This should have been udev action instead of some weird boot time scripting

I disagree with that. Udev manages devices nodes and that's all it should do. It shouldn't touch anything at all outside of /dev. Everybody that doesn't know complains about shell scripting, but the real truth is, it's one of the most awesome and powerful features of desktop linux. There's a a good reason why shell scripts are implemented so widely. Often times they are the simplest way to solve a problem.

[Ericg]

That's not really a problem for gentoo or arch users. Gentoo at least has had eselect to switch opengl profiles for a long time. I had always assumed Fedora and Ubuntu and the rest must have had similar tools too.

I'm not sure ANY other distro other than Sabayon has a 'gpu driver switcher' method like Gentoo does. Even Arch I'm not sure about, unless its something out of the AUR.

[duby229]

I'm not sure ANY other distro other than Sabayon has a 'gpu driver switcher' method like Gentoo does. Even Arch I'm not sure about, unless its something out of the AUR.

Arch has eselect available on aur.

[GreatEmerald]

I'm not sure ANY other distro other than Sabayon has a 'gpu driver switcher' method like Gentoo does. Even Arch I'm not sure about, unless its something out of the AUR.

Actually, there is update-alternatives, which at least on openSUSE has an entry for libglx.so.