Guide to get your egpu working in linux

This is a very small guide of what I did to setup my egpu.

My Hardware

• eGPU Enclosure: Razer Core X - Thunderbolt™ 3 eGPU
• eGPU: ROG Strix GeForce® RTX 2080 SUPER™ OC edition 8GB GDDR6
• Notebook: Intel® NUC 12 Pro Kit RNUC12WSHI50001 (has an Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics Chip)

My Software

• Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS
• akmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda (version 4.4.0)

PreConditions

• 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

Setup

You only need to put 4 files at the right locations and you are basically done.

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phstudy/egpu-setup/master/egpu to /usr/local/bin/egpu
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phstudy/egpu-setup/master/egpu.service to /etc/systemd/system/egpu.service
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phstudy/egpu-setup/master/xorg.conf.egpu to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.egpu
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phstudy/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

You are done

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

Attention

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