This is a very small guide of what I did to setup my egpu.
My hardware
- eGPU Enclosure: Razer Core X Chroma
- eGPU: Asus Geforce 1080 Strix TI with 11GB Ram
- Notebook: Lenovo X1 Extreme (already has a Intel HD Chip and a Nvidia Geforce 1050 TI Mobile)
MySoftware
- Fedora Silverblue 31
- akmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda (version 4.4.0)
setup the appropriate driver for the gpu's you are using
make sure your desktop environment is using xorg - https://www.x.org/wiki/ Will probably be true for most distros
you might want blacklist your old driver, I did it with the nouveau driver
# some of the things going well in silverblue, add kernel arguments. You need to reboot for this to take effect
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append=rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau --append=modprobe.blacklist=nouveau --append=nvidia-drm.modeset=1
ensure thunderbolt authorization works properly
you should understand basic linux things, for example bash or systemd
You only need to put 4 files at the right locations and you are basically done.
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/claudio-walser/egpu-setup/master/egpu to /usr/local/bin/egpu
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/claudio-walser/egpu-setup/master/egpu.service to /etc/systemd/system/egpu.service
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/claudio-walser/egpu-setup/master/xorg.conf.egpu to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.egpu
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/claudio-walser/egpu-setup/master/xorg.conf.internal to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.internal
Then run some commands
# make the file executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/egpu
# enable egpu.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable egpu.service
If both of your xorg config files are right, you should now be able to switch to your egpu using:
/usr/local/bin/egpu start
If you are done using it fire a stop command, unplug the egpu only after you have X on your internal screen again
/usr/local/bin/egpu stop
These are my configs, the might not work for you.
xorg.conf.internal should basically contain what you had before you started using an egpu
xorg.conf.egpu file could be useful for you, find out the Device ID with
lspci | grep VGA
nvidia-smi -L # in case you have nvidia gpus as i do