Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Can you post the firmware versions and any issues. May help identify any issue some are having with that slot.

 

I updated the original post to add:

I've encountered no issues with the 980 Pro.

 

I forgot to mention that my 7560's BIOS (version 1.2.2) contains the warning message, "Linux is not supported with Hybrid Graphics Enabled." I have NOT tested to see what happens in my installation of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS if I enable hybrid graphics.

 

Most likely nothing disastrous will happen; the system will run on the Intel GPU and the NVIDIA GPU will be basically sitting there unused. Linux doesn't have native support for graphics switching (rendering on one GPU and outputting on another). There was a project "Bumblebee" aiming to provide this but it seems to have stalled out...
https://www.bumblebee-project.org/

...You might be able to get it "sort of" working with some work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/aoh5be/guide_hybrid_graphics_on_linux_nvidia_optimus/

 

It actually does—support for frame buffer offloading has been available since driver 435.17, using PRIME render offload.

The driver also supports advanced Windows-style runtime D3 power management on Turing and Ampere cards.

There are some caveats. Given the novelty of these features, they require very recent kernels and Xorg/Wayland packages; as such, 'stable' distros with fixed version releases like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc may only have partial/no support on older versions. This is a non-issue on rolling-release distros like Arch.

Furthermore, there are a fair few bugs still—for instance, the Precision has the HDMI and DP ports directly connected to the NVIDIA GPU, if the notebook is equipped with one—this means reverse PRIME offloading is needed, where the image is rendered on the iGPU (source), and copied to the dGPU frame buffer and thence to the outputs (sinks). There are issues with sync causing the frame buffer to only refresh at 1 FPS when only the external display is enabled, aka the laptop is used in clamshell mode. This is apparently fixed upstream, but when I last fired up Arch (about a month ago, haven't used it since because of the SSD slot problem), the package available still hadn't fixed this issue. I suspect the repo needs to be pulled, manually compiled and installed; there's probably an AUR package that does this.

Overall, Linux support is fairly decent, with some issues; I suspect the fingerprint reader will be another problem point.

It's a lot better than it was two years ago, and NVIDIA + Wayland actually looks like it might be a thing now.

Gaming on Linux is also possible through either Proton (a WINE extension by Valve), or by passing through the dGPU into a VM with VFIO and GPU passthrough. I couldn't exactly get the latter working (probably because I was not very involved), but with the 7560 I am determined to get GPU passthrough working as much as I can, so this reduces the necessity of booting into Windows at all.

 

Alright, guess things have moved along more than I have been paying attention to.

On the fingerprint reader side, things should be fine on Linux now I think. They just finally added support for it last year. (Got to add the Dell deb repo and install driver packages out of there. I haven't actually tested it myself. It doesn't work for older systems, only 10th gen and up I think.)

 

Ooh, do you have a link to the repositories and drivers? I'm interested in repackaging this for Arch if possible...

 

I did this with Arch for a while actually for a while, and used a remote X-window into Arch exclusively to open the VM manager window. Then when I did an update, everything crashed and burned - and it was complicated enough to do on a desktop. When I look at the Optimus-specific guides for GPU passthrough, I get afraid and do whatever it takes to stay in Windows land If you get a good working set up, though, I bet a lot of people here would be interested in a guide.

 

For those that installed the samsung 980 pro ssd, is there any special samsung nvme driver for it, or do you let windows provide the nvme driver for this one?
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/ doesn't seem to list a samsung nvme driver for the 980 pro, only 970 pro and below?

 

deb http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-dell public
# deb-src http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-dell public

deb http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-oem public
# deb-src http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-oem public

deb http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-somerville public
# deb-src http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-somerville public

deb http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/ focal-somerville-melisa public
# deb-src http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates focal-somerville-melisa public

(...update "focal" with whatever version of Ubuntu you want)
A Dell rep said that this bunch of packages would support IR camera and fingerprint reader on XPS.
sudo apt install oem-somerville-melisa-meta libfprint-2-tod1-goodix oem-somerville-meta tlp-config