Hi all,

I am running into a weird issue. It's usually intermittent and fixes itself after a few boot attempts, but right now it is pretty consistent. I have nvidia quadro video card with a Lenovo W520 - it's one of those cards with the NVidia Optimus feature.
Every time that I set the bios to use discrete graphics, my boot hangs on "waiting for /dev to be fully populated". When I switch to the integrated intel card, everything works fine. Is there a way to debug this to narrow it down and figure out what's causing the issue? The boot won't finish, it just sits there at the message and I have to restart and switch to the onboard intel car to be able to boot into linux. I have to reboot between 5-10 times for something to finally kick in with the discrete card and then the boot finishes, but it's very frustrating.
This issue is frustrating me so much, that I am considering switching back to windows to use my nvidia card to its full extent.

Linux Mint Debian edition 3.2 kernel.

Have you read this http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/bumbl...a-optimus.html

Hi Babertje,

I was aware of the bumblebee project, but wasn't planning on using that yet. Are you suggesting that the current nvidia driver I am using is faulty and I should switch to bumblebee, hoping to fix my problem in doing so?

Nvidia is working on this with the latest beta driver from Nvidia (302.7)

Save for Intel would be to compile kernel module like this to keep the standard GL libs for your internal intel card
If installed; See: usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/html/optimus.html and;
Hope this helps

Do you have any idea what's the advantage/disadvantage of going with 302.7 vs bumblebee? From the bumblebee wiki here: https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee it looks like bumblebee is using the nvidia proprietary modules and drivers, which is what I have installed now, so I am not sure if that would solve the problem with the hanging. If I understand things correctly, bumblebee just provides the switching between the cards, which I am doing manually myself now via the switch in the bios. I don't understand the reason behind the limitation on Linux. It's obvious that NVidia is providing active support to their drivers, I wonder why they can't just make it work on linux like the already did on windows? There is probably a good reason for it.

I can't believe that I am posting this, but a year later I found a solution to this annoying problem. I am extremely surprised that there isn't more information online by now since I firmly believe this is a very common issue. We just bought quite a few new W520s at work and they all have this problem. The solution is to disable virtualization from the BIOS. Once virtualization is disabled the computer boots without issues. Virtualbox and VMware will be slow if you need them, but oh well. Here is some more info about the problem: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Linux-Di...ia/td-p/577789

I had the same issue on a t430. Adding nox2apic as a boot param seems to have resolved it.