How to solve Bumblebee/Nvidia Optimus issues with kernel 3.4 (works perfectly under 3.2)

Question

I installed Ubuntu and could setup to utilize my Intel HD 3000/Geforce GT 540M hybrid graphics perfectly with the method described here: Is a NVIDIA GeForce with Optimus Technology supported by Ubuntu?

Everything works fine under Kernel 3.2. Now I wanted to upgrade though to Kernel 3.4, as it brings many improvements, especially in saving battery life (ie. Intel RC6)... at least from what I heard.

While I had no issues installing the 3.4 Kernel under Ubuntu 12.04 and everything so far runs fine, Bumblebee causes issues under kernel 3.4. When trying to run commands like optirun, lsmod (or similar kernel tools) these just lock up and never return. The Bumblebee developers seem to refuse to help with mainline kernels (as seen here: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch/issues/17 ).

Does anyone know, how to solve this issue? Could I solve this probably, by compiling the kernel and/or Bumblebee against the kernels sources myself and having a Ubuntu-like kernel?

Any other idea that might help me to solve this myself, so I could profit from the 3.4 features and Optimus, would be very appreciated.

Answer 1

The mainline kernels are problematic because those are built with an incompatible toolchain. If you want to have the newer 3.4 kernel in an easy way, grab the .deb files from Ubuntu+1 (Quantal):

• http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/linux-image-generic
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/linux-headers-generic

You need the linux-image-<version>-generic and linux-headers-<version>-generic packages linked from the above pages. Also, linux-image-extra-<version>-generic seems also to be necessary. Install the headers before the image to allow the bbswitch and nvidia driver to be built correctly.