How to force the vmware workstation 12.5.5 to use the nvidia graphics card with optirun / primusrun? No GPU passthrough involved

Question

I am happy owner of hybrid-graphics system (sarcasm).

At my disposal I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960m graphics card with Intel integrated graphics card. The lspci names this Intel card as Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller. But I believe it would be enough to give the name of the processor (Intel Core i7-4720HQ) to identify the Intel graphics card.

Yesterday I have installed VMware Workstation 12.5.5 in order to setup Windows 10 as a quest on my Debian 9 (RC3) host system. Unfortunately I have realized that my virtual machine is using Intel card instead of Nvidia card.

Let my show output of sudo optirun nvidia-smi:

Mon May 15 09:14:40 2017       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 375.39                 Driver Version: 375.39                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 960M    Off  | 0000:01:00.0     Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   46C    P0    N/A /  N/A |      5MiB /  4044MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      8844    G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                               4MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

This output was collected while the VM was running 3DMark 2.3.3. Virtual machine was started as: optirun vmware

I know that some of you might say "you can not use Nvidia card on your guest virtual machine". But my question is not about GPU passthrough...

If I had to PCI passtrough my Nvidia card to the virtual machine, I would use qemu/kvm - not VMware Workstation.

All I want to do or see is the following:

1. Run optirun vmware
2. See VMware VM (or vmx) listed as a process running on the Nvidia GPU (nvidia-smi would be the indicator). (Sorry, by VMware VM or vmx I mean my guest virtual machine)

How can I force this behavior? I admit that I tried only to run workstation through optirun but I don't know what else to do.

Answer 1

By chance I found this script. It comes with this instruction.

Unfortunately it does not support debian 9 (rc3), and i think that author just gave up on this project. I am not experienced enough to modify this script by myself, but with a bit of luck, someone will.

If anyone will find out how this script forces the vmware vm's to run on Nvidia card (through primusrun / optirun), please post an answer in this topic.