Primusrun/Optirun allegedly cannot locate/open config directory: “/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d”

Question

I have recently switched from open source drivers to nvidia, to bumblebee as instructed by ubuntuforums.org users to better use my two gpu's capabilities. It also so happens that it does not seem to work at all, I keep getting this error regardless of which command I try.

Doing ll /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d I can see that this presumed config file is a directory, I am not too knowledgeable about this but I think it's correct provided the .d extension.

Full error:

optirun glxgears
[ 9546.928811] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) Unable to locate/open config directory: "/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d"

primusrun glxgears
primus: fatal: Bumblebee daemon reported: error: [XORG] (EE) Unable to locate/open config directory: "/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d"

EDIT: I didn't specify it but yes xorg.conf.d exists and if I try use ll on that directory my result is this:

ll /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.d
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 jan  2 14:54 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 jun 18 22:55 ../

Answer 1

An alternative solution to get optirun working might be to not to use bumblebee (and primusrun) at all.

I had ongoing bumblebee/nvidia problems ("[XORG] (EE) No devices detected", different symptom to the one reported here). I noticed that https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus reports that PRIME render offload (not bumblebee) is the method supported by Nvidia, and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bumblebee reports "Bumblebee has significant performance issues".

When I tried it, it fixed the problem on my system (Debian unstable with nvidia 510.60.02) immediately, by using

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia glxgears

instead of primusrun glxgears

A convenience script is provided at https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/nvidia-prime/trunk/prime-run, enabling it to run simply as prime-run glxgears.