'Optimus technology' is a software [and possibly hardware]
solution for automatically switching between an integrated
graphics chip or IGP (such as on onboard intel chip) and a more
powerful [nvidia] graphics chip. This technology is intended
specifically for laptops. The precursor to this technology was
'switchable graphics,' in which the user could manually switch
between the graphics card. It may require that the Nvidia GPU
has the PCOPY engine. There is currently no kernel-land support
for optimus in linux (more below). Why is Optimus not currently
supported under Linux? First lets review: The graphics system in
a laptop has a gpu with some memory, in the case of an IGP, this
memory may be a piece of system memory, but otherwise it is
usually dedicated memory living on the GPU. This GPU connects to
a laptop display, or output port. There are two main problems to
solve in order to support optimus under linux: 1) Currently we
do not have a way to a priori know what outputs (displays) are
connected to what G