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Credit where credit is dueCredit where credit is duePosted Mar 14, 2009 19:45 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: Credit where credit is due by sbergman27 Parent article: Ts'o: Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem
That's not entirely true.... they attempted to fix this problem several weeks ago by cherry picking proposed patches from Ted before the merge into mainline. But the cherry pick doesn't have appeared to work.
As of 03-06 people were still reporting problems in that ticket.
Even Kirkland reports the problem persists in some form as of 03-07 and affecting encrypted home directories. Lets just hope this wasn't the issue which forced Ubuntu to pull encrypted home directory support from the installer in Alpha6 and Jaunty final. That was a pretty cool feature to make available at install time for laptop users, it's a shame they had to pull the plug on it.
Its unfortunate that an upstream ticket was never created as part of that launchpad process to keep Ted in the loop. It seems in the past, Ubuntu user discovered real kernel bugs get a faster fix if the bugs find their way to the upstream kernel tracker for other kernel developers to be made aware of. For example:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12821
But the external Ubuntu community certainly gets the credit for finding the bug...that's for sure. It seems Canonical has decided to make it easy for Ubuntu users to crash a system at unexpected times quite frequently. We should definitely thank Canonical for that. That is an important part of fuzz testing that I think the upstream kernel developers may overlook since their rabid passionate focus on keeping crashes from happening at all. How many of us do things like pull the power at random times on our systems to recreate a situation that looks like an unexpected crash scenario. I rarely think to do it. Physically pulling out the battery on my laptop to fuzz test a crash scenario isn't something I've even thought about doing.
It's good to see Canonical strongly committing to the idea of comprehensive testing to the extent that they are willing to give their users highly unstable combinations of kernel+module environments to work with to find these sorts of bugs which only crop up in unexpected and unlooked for kernel crashes. Hats off to them. By sacrificing overall system reliability for millions of users on a daily basis, they are able to flush out bugs which can only be seen when other problems(which can't be fixed by the kernel developers themselves such as out of tree drivers) cause the kernel to crash in an unexpected way. I'm not sure this is the sort of commitment to directly support upstream development that some of use we hoping to see from Canonical...but its something.
-jef
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Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 14, 2009 21:30 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well it's not really due to cononical or anybody like that.
What it seems to me is that they have been able to garner a following among neophite Linux users that not only want to test and run bleeding edge software, they want to get all their graphic goodness to go with it.
Since graphics in Linux sucked for so long the only effective vendor for people wanting superior 3d performance is Nvidia. It's not the user's fault that this has simply been a fact of life for Linux for a long time now.
Nvidia makes unstable drivers. For Vista or XP or Linux they are going to be a major source of issues; it doesn't matter. With bleeding edge versions of Linux that are unstable to begin with then your going to run into a lot of crashes.
So it's nobody's fault really.. not anybody here or involved with Ubuntu. This is why we have beta testers and they are doing their jobs. Everybody should be thankful that this problem is being resolved now rather then on your servers and workstations.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 14, 2009 23:19 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
No it really is Canonical's fault...for making it easy for non-technical users to build and use these proprietary drivers. Drivers that would be a gpl violation for Canonical to build and distribute in binary form.
http://www.linux.com/feature/55915
Canonical is doing a very very neat tap dance here. They don't distribute the binary drivers...if they did that they'd be engaging in an activity that is restricted by the gpl and could easily be called out on it. No, Canonical is much more clever, they encourage users to download the source and binary bits together and compile them locally on the system, avoiding the distribution of the infringing binary module all together. They've even made a point and click gui to kick off this process. Clever Canonical, skating around the edges of gpl infringement and at the same time introducing significant instability into their userbase's experience without an effort to adequately inform users as to what is going on and the pontential downsides.
I don't think its exactly fair to expect the upstream kernel developers to support this sort of behaviour. And I'll note, that because of the tricks being used to avoid a gpl violation scenario, Canonical can't even do its own integration testing on these modules. There are no centrally built and distributed binaries.
Canonical might be avoiding a gpl violation by doing things this way, but they are certainly breaking some of the spirit of the intent.
-jef
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 13:29 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link] No it really is Canonical's faultFedora dude blaming/attacking Canonical again...
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 17:25 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> No it really is Canonical's fault...for making it easy for non-technical users to build and use these proprietary drivers. Drivers that would be a gpl violation for Canonical to build and distribute in binary form.
No.
Cononical exists in reality, they are not the ones that created it.
People were installing nvidia drivers on Nvidia, Fedora, Redhat, Debian, etc etc etc long long before Ubuntu ever came onto the scene.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 14, 2009 23:13 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
Jef, your defensive and hateful attitude pretty well sums up (one of) the reason(s) that I gave up on Fedora after having used Red Hat at my home and in my consulting since the old Red Hat Linux 4.2 back in 1997 or whenever it was. Yes, I'm still working on migrating machines off of it. (BTW, instability is another major reason I gave up on Fedora.)
To think that a Fedora advocate, of all people, could have the gall to criticize *any* other distro's stability is nearly unbelievable.
I currently have Intel video. But I have experience with both NVidia's drivers and Fedora's FOSS Radeon drivers and Intel drivers. And NVidia wins hands down for stability. Which is not to say that my stability complaints end there. Not by a long shot.
It seems that the Jef Spaleta FUD-fountain flows eternal. Fortunately, the more it flows, the less credibility people accord it.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 14, 2009 23:46 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Please, don't take my word for it. My word is work about as much as a piece of SCO stock...which I have to say looks like a safe bet as far as stocks go given all the other craziness going around right now.
How NVidia impedes Free Desktop adoption.
Linux Graphics Essay
"Nvidia isn't in the list of top oops causers as part of some grand strategy to make itself (and Linux) look bad. It's there because the cost of doing the QA and continuous engineering to support the changing interfaces and to detect and correct these problems outweighs the revenue it can bring in from the Linux market. In essence this is because binary drivers totally negate the shared support and maintenance burden which is what makes Open Source so compelling."
If you must, feel free to shoot the messenger. Make it personal if that's what you need in order to engage on the issues. I'm more than happy to take a few bullets. But for anyone who cares about sustainable growth of the linux ecosystem to disregard the validity of the information is pure folly. Binary drivers are a real and significant problem to the stability of linux systems. The people doing the actually development of the linux desktop realize this, even if individual users and the entire Canonical workforce do not.
-jef
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 0:47 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
"""
Please, don't take my word for it. """
There surely was never any danger of that. If bias were black body radiation, you'd be glowing at about 3500K. (Which hurts your credibility substantially. And likely not just with me.)
Now, I certainly don't care for NVidia keeping their drivers closed source. But in my experience with graphics drivers under Linux (which goes back to VooDoo1 and the original, pre Daryll Strauss, glide driver, and having lived through the hell that has been FOSS Radeon driver, I'd have to say that on all the cards I've had, including some NVidias, the NVidia driver has been flawless compared to the big mess that the usually incomplete FOSS video drivers often seem to be.
I wish that were not that case. But it has been my experience for about 10 years now.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 1:15 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I guess your 10 year streak of good luck is the silver lining of hopeful comfort for all the Ubuntu users running the nvidia drivers and experiencing lock ups when exiting World of Goo. And I'm sure the upstream kernel developers are willing to discount their own long experience looking at crash reports now that you've made us aware of your high regard of the nvidia driver's stability.
I like that vibe you've got going on there. One man's personal experience against a mountain of contrary opinion and evidence. That's the sort of awe inspiring situational awareness and view of the big picture that causes me to respect opponents to global warming and evolutionary theory so very very highly. I salute you!
I'm really glad the Ubuntu developers decided to finally enable kerneloop reporting so we can get a more comprehensive and unbiased view of the sources of instability in the Ubuntu kernel. Though I'm not sure they are in the kerneloops.org database yet. I personally fully expect that the Ubuntu experience will be much like the Fedora one in the kerneloops record. The proprietary drivers will dominate the crash reporting statistics...Canonical will introduce some bugs via patches, which will be quickly fixed (just as Fedora has)...but the proprietary driver bugs, like nvidia, will linger and linger...contrary to your singular personal experience.
-jef
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 12:23 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
What's wrong with the FOSS radeon driver? I've had no trouble with it
(mach64 and now 9250). 3D is fast enough for my purposes, 2D is blinding (and is now even faster thanks to a not-yet-committed patch from Michel Dänzer to defragment the EXA glyph cache)... I've had a total of one crash in ten years, and that was due to a device-independent Mesa bug.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 16, 2009 1:18 UTC (Mon) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]
I plugged a USB thumbdrive into my x86-64 machine running then nvidia driver last night and the driver crashed, hard. WTF?
Of course, anecdote != data, but the kerneloops website tells the story.
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 15, 2009 14:18 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
"""
That's not entirely true.... they attempted to fix this problem several weeks ago by cherry picking proposed patches from Ted before the merge into mainline. But the cherry pick doesn't have appeared to work. """
Well, Ted has clearly pointed to the patches he thinks are the best work-around (for at least sparing files which already exist) he has. I started to say "safer" instead of "safe" in my post, but decided to give Ted's patches the benefit of any doubt. Apparently, they are not such an effective work-around, and the Ext4 guys need to come up with something better that does not eat data. Ext4 has about zero chance of becoming the default for any distro except Fedora until they do.
BTW, I hope you don't mind that I'm starting to quote you as an example of how threatened advocates of some distros feel about other distros which they perceive as being more successful. You're the most illustrative example of the phenomenon of which I am aware. (Though I'll stop short of thanking you for providing such a clear example.)
Credit where credit is due Posted Mar 16, 2009 1:25 UTC (Mon) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]
Warggahble, etc.
Did you even *read* the article?
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