Hi,
I’m here to ask for inspiration:
I’m writing a GUI to set per application if GPU offloading should be active or not. My best idea so far was to parse the system for .desktop files and overload them in ~/.local/share/applications/ with the according environment variables set (e.g. copying the the .desktop entry and changing the Exec= key to Exec=primerun with primerun being a small script setting __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 and __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia).
However this approach is prone to error because .desktop files are a moving target and there is other stuff creating .desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications/.
I would much prefer to set it on a per binary basis like the GUI in windows allows the user to do. However I didn’t find a way to set the environment variable or something equivalent based on a binary path being executed.
Does anyone know how the Windows driver/settings gui handles this? I checked C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvtf.inf_amd64_<some_hex_number>\nv-vk64.json what I assume to be the Windows equivalent of /usr/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d/nvidia_layers.json, but unlike on Linux it does not check an environment variable, so I assume the setting is not handles via environment variables on Windows.
Does someone have an idea where in the execution chain i could hook into to have something like if <binary_path>: set <environment>
? I already found the code location that checks for __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 and __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia in the Vulkan (VulkanLoader) and OpenGL (libglvnd) sourcecode respectifly, however i didn’t find a hint of alternative decision mechnisms.
Sorry for the long novel above, I tried to summerise my research so far as short as possible.