I decided boost the power of my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6, which is now 3 years old to the date with an eGPU.
I bought a ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 12GB TUF Gaming and a Mantiz Saturn Pro
The setup took me a couple of days, as I am runnig ubuntu (20.04) as my primary OS. Had a lot of troubles with kernel 5.4.0-104-generic, modules didn’t want to get build and rebooting just hanged into a blank screen. For some reason 5.4.0-100-generic seems work fine, but to figure that out I lost half a day of bashing my head.
I am also using a secondary Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock as this laptop has 2 thunderbolt 3 ports - which is very convenient. The not-so-cool thing being that both thunderbolt ports run on the same bus, so no matter where you connect your devices - the bandwidth will be the shared, however the Thinkpad dock has much more ports to connect stuff to, and the Mantiz has only 2 usb ports on the back and I don’t want cables dangling from the front side (3 USBs there).
The tricky part: switching eGPU<->internal
Disconnecting the dock and going back to embeded intel/i915.
Simplest thing to do is have 2 xorg.conf files, one having the nvidia settings, and the other having the intel settings. A very important Option here is the "AllowExternalGpus" "True" without it the external card didn’t want to start at all.
nvidia (generated by sudo nvidia-xconfig --prime):
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
Inactive "InactiveDevice1"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
Option "AllowExternalGpus" "1"
EndSection
Section "Files"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BusID "PCI:10:0:0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "InactiveDevice1"
Driver "modesetting"
VendorName "Unknown"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration" "True"
Option "AllowExternalGpus" "True"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
intel:
Section "Device"
Identifier "iris"
#Driver "modesetting"
Driver "i915"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
Then just swapping both files and doing sudo service gdm3 restart did the job to switch back to the internal graphics card, however trying to switch back to the nvidia proved to be impossible, even disconncting and reconnecting the dock - didn’t help. I had to reboot. That wasn’t going to stand, so I started playing with the xorg, nvidia drivers and whatnot.
I found this in syslog when restrting gdm3:
Mar 13 09:33:10 X1C /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[316231]: (II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
Mar 13 09:33:10 X1C /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[316231]: (WW) Warning, couldn't open module nvidia
Mar 13 09:33:10 X1C /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[316231]: (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module does not exist, 0)
howerver modprobe nvidia worked just fine… so what was the issue?
I tried to remove the nvidia driver and reload it but..
$ rmmod nvidia
rmmod: ERROR: Module nvidia is in use by: nvidia_uvm nvidia_modeset
Removing nvidia_modeset was also not working because of dependancies of nvidia_drm - so it was clear I had to reload all nvidia drivers, I build those 2 bash scripts:
Assuming you are docking your laptop as you were working on it, first connect all thunderbold 3 cables to both docks, then switching to egpu:
# ./egpu.sh
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/X11/xorg.conf.egpu /etc/X11/xorg.conf
echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/rescan
sleep 2
sudo rmmod nvidia_uvm
sudo rmmod nvidia_modeset
sudo rmmod nvidia_drm
sudo rmmod nvidia
sudo modprobe nvidia
sudo modprobe nvidia_uvm
sudo modprobe nvidia_modeset
sudo modprobe nvidia_drm
sudo service gdm3 restart
switching to internal gpu:
# ./internal.sh
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/X11/xorg.conf.internal /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo service gdm3 restart
And in case you want to disconnect all thunderbold docks:
# to identify the thunderbolt controller:
$ lspci -vt
...
-[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v6/7th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers
+-02.0 Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 620
+-04.0 Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem
+-08.0 Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
+-14.0 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller
+-14.2 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem
+-15.0 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0
+-16.0 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI #1
+-1c.0-[02]----00.0 Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275
+-1c.4-[04]----00.0 Intel Corporation SSD Pro 7600p/760p/E 6100p Series
+-1d.0-[05-6f]----00.0-[06-6f]--+-00.0-[07]----00.0 Intel Corporation JHL6540 Thunderbolt 3 NHI (C step) [Alpine Ridge 4C 2016]
| +-01.0-[08-3a]----00.0-[09-3a]--+-01.0-[0a]--+-00.0 NVIDIA Corporation GA104 [GeForce RTX 3060]
| | | \-00.1 NVIDIA Corporation GA104 High Definition Audio Controller
| | \-04.0-[0b-3a]----00.0-[0c-3a]--+-00.0-[0d]----00.0 Fresco Logic FL1100 USB 3.0 Host Controller
| | +-01.0-[0e]----00.0 Fresco Logic FL1100 USB 3.0 Host Controller
| | \-02.0-[0f]----00.0 Intel Corporation JHL6240 Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.1 Controller (Low Power) [Alpine Ridge LP 2016]
| +-02.0-[3b]--
| \-04.0-[3c-6f]----00.0-[3d-6f]--+-02.0-[3e]----00.0 Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 USB Controller [Titan Ridge DD 2018]
| \-04.0-[3f-6f]--
+-1f.0 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point LPC Controller/eSPI Controller
+-1f.2 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC
+-1f.3 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio
+-1f.4 Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus
\-1f.6 Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (4) I219-V
...
# disconnect it
$ echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/remove
Now I can switch between the two without reboots!