Why doesn't Bumblebee work with Nvidia GT640M?

Question

I've done a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04 from a liveCD on a Samsung Series 7 Chronos with a 3rd Gen i7 and the Nvidia GeForce GT 640M.

I've followed this: (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee#Installation) to install bumblebee so I can switch to my discrete GPU. I have not used ironhide, or preivous bumblee since it's a clean install.

When I use optirun, optirun says it can't initialize the GPU:

[ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0.  Please

[ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

I've looked at the troubleshooting page for bumblebee and I have the correct driver and do not think I have aspci disabled.

Also, my keyboard becomes very unresponsive and my mouse skips and isn't smooth after optirun crashes. The only thing to fix this is a reboot.

Here's my lspci | grep VGA output:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0fd2 (rev ff)

It seems Ubuntu can see my graphics card. I don't really know what's going on.

Answer 1

From the Bumblebee Troubleshooting webpage

Failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0. Please ...

PCI:1:0:0 may vary, but take a look at the last lines of the kernel log (usually located at /var/log/kern.log, /var/log/kernel or /var/log/messages). You're probably using an outdated driver or messed a bit with improper ACPI calls (see above).

If you've already been over that, then you will need to file a bug report with the bumblebee project, so that they can help diagnose your problem.

Answer 2

This issue is already reported in the Bumblebee issue list #172:

GT650M: Failed to initialize NVIDIA GPU

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/172

I have the same issuse with my Dell Inspiron 17R-SE (Ivy bridge i7, GT 650M). I tried different nvidia drivers (259.59, 302.17, 304.22, with the same failure.