Ubuntu will not detect integrated graphics card on Macbook Pro

Question

I have been attempting to enable graphics card switching through bumblebee or Nvidia Prime. I successfully installed both, however I was unable to get Nvidia Prime to actually give me the option to view prime profiles.

I believe the reason is that Ubuntu will not recognize the integrated graphics card on the laptop. For reference, it is a 2013 MBP with an Nvidia 750M discrete card, and an Intel integrated card. However, when I run lspci|grep -i vga 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M Mac Edition] (rev a1)

is all that is shown. The system cannot seem to indicate that the intel chip is present no matter what I try. The kernal is the latest version, and Ubuntu 16.1 is being used. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This is because macbook UEFI disables intel card on booting any other os than macOS.

They easiest way to solve it, is installing rEFInd which has a spoof_osx_version support, faking it would be booting macOS to its UEFI. The build in UEFI setting cannot be changed, as disables the settings interface.

After installing rEFInd as descirbed in the doc, open refind.conf typically under /boot/efi/EFI/refind , then find, uncomment and change the following line:

spoof_osx_version 12.7.3

Reboot and verify both cards were loaded with

lscpi | grep VGA

You should see Intel and Nvidia cards now listed.

HINT:

Fedora by default installs /boot/uefi on a HFS+ partition on this machine. (might change in future) Refind install scripts fails if the partition is not vfat. The only method which worked then was dowloading rEFInd from sourceforge and use the manual method. However its basically just unzipping and copying files onto /boot/efi