jranaraki/switch

This is a small script to switch between Intel and Nvidia graphics cards

Switch

This is a small script to switch between Intel and Nvidia graphics cards.

Requirements

• Your username should have sudo privilages
• The target system must run Linux and have both Intel and Nvidia graphics cards. To make sure you have the required hardware, run lspci | grep "VGA" in the terminal. The output should look like the followings:

name@name-hostname:~$ lspci | grep "VGA"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GLM [Quadro P1000 Mobile] (rev a1)

• Make sure the Nvidia driver is correctly installed by running 'nvidia-smi' in the terminal. If the output looks like the follwoings, don't worry! This is only because you are using the Intel raphics card and nvidia-smi cannot communicate with the Nvidia one.

name@name-hostname:~$ nvidia-smi
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

How it works

To run the script, download switch.sh from the repo. Then, open the terminal, navigate to the folder you have just downloaded switch.sh in (usually Downloads), and run the following command to make the shell file executable.

name@name-hostname:~$ cd Downloads/
name@name-hostname:~/Downloads$ chmod +x switch.sh
name@name-hostname:~/Downloads$ 

Now, run the script to switch from the current (in this case, Intel) graphics card to the other one (i.e. Nvidia):

name@name-hostname:~/Downloads$ ./switch.sh 
[sudo] password for name: 
Current device is nvidia!

Now reboot the system, and nvidia-smi should work and generate an output similar to the followings:

name@name-hostname:~$ nvidia-smi
Wed Nov 23 12:35:23 2022       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 515.65.01    Driver Version: 515.65.01    CUDA Version: 11.7     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro P1000        Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   56C    P3    N/A /  N/A |    171MiB /  4096MiB |      0%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      1830      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                 76MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2304      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell               91MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

To switch back to the other graphics card, run switch.sh again:

name@name-hostname:~/Downloads$ ./switch.sh 
[sudo] password for name: 
Current device is intel!