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Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29Posted Apr 22, 2009 16:25 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)In reply to: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 by flammon Parent article: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29
I wondered how long it would take for the mindless and uninformed bashing to begin. As a casual, but long time Linux gamer, I've been watching the Linux graphics situation since about 1997, having owned quite a number of different graphics cards over that time. All in all, and despite a huge wind of FUD coming from certain agenda-driven Linux kernel developers, I have found NVidia's drivers to be about the highest quality of any Linux drivers I have ever run, open source or closed.
Probably my vote for the "Lifetime Embarrassment Award" would go to the perpetually unfinished open-source Radeon driver. At least my Intel X4500 graphics are finally stable. I purchased an MB with a G43 chipset last Fall, specifically because Intel was supposed to be doing such a great job supporting Linux FOSS drivers. And it was, without a doubt, the *worst* Linux graphics experience I have ever had. I had to go back to my NVidia for a couple of months, waiting for even the *text consoles* to become usable.
So be careful about trashing NVidia and making implied claims about FOSS video driver quality. Because there is a lot more embarrassing evidence I could throw back at you.
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Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 Posted Apr 22, 2009 17:55 UTC (Wed) by rakoenig (subscriber, #29855) [Link]
You're right. Nobody should put the blame on nVidia in this case as they were very much helpful in fixing this issue after it was reported to them. Luckily Fujitsu was able to quickly provide a test machine to the nVIDIA developers and a repair tool that fixes the problem without the need of sending the machine back for repair (sorry guys, that is non-free and not to be redistributed). But at least in that way it was possible to give bugfixes some "test shots" without the hazard that a false move means sending the machine back for repair and waiting some days for the next shot.
And they also provided beta drivers early that already fixed the problem quickly, but it took still a while for the public release.
So besides of the GPL vs. proprietary driver discussion I have to say that even in a mixed world with OSS software and proprietary drives customers should be aware that they get full support for problems. And currently nVIDIA is "state-of-the-art" in 3D graphics and BTW: in a notebook you don't have much choice to replace the graphics card. :-)
So thanks to the team that provided all the knowledge, tools and skills to quickly fix this bug and thanks to the (thank god) few customers that were patiently waiting for the final bugfix.
Rainer (The reporter of bug 433 on RPMFusion :-)
Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:30 UTC (Wed) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] You probably also think the kernel developers are just being asses for not accepting backtraces from non-graphics parts of the kernels when you have nvidia binary blobs insmodded? It was insightful to read a comment by one of the ext4 developers (I think it was Greg Kroah-Hartman) about the fsync 0-byte file issue. He very specifically pointed to nvidia binary blob issues where it is known to randomly corrupt memory when wondering about people who tolerate kernel crashes. Call it bashing if you wish, but I don't want anything unsupportable crap like that near my computer, thank you, and I do feel I'm the pragmatic one here.
Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 Posted Apr 22, 2009 23:55 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
It was insightful to read a comment by one of the ext4 developers (I think it was Greg Kroah-Hartman) about the fsync 0-byte file issue. """
No. It was Ted Tso. He initially tried to blame the whole problem on NVidia and Ubuntu users... and then on the majority of application developers... but then ended up fixing the worst problems with his filesystem, instead, when enough people pointed out what he was doing.
I followed those discussions closely, and would hardly call that particular part of them "insightful". "Wildly Blameful" would probably be a more accurate term to apply.
I would prefer FOSS drivers to proprietary ones. I would like to see NVidia open up. But the fact remains that NVidia's drivers have historically been of higher quality than most of the FOSS video drivers. And denying that doesn't help FOSS. Higher quality FOSS drivers would help FOSS.
Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 Posted May 18, 2009 18:03 UTC (Mon) by daenzer (✭ supporter ✭, #7050) [Link]
> Probably my vote for the "Lifetime Embarrassment Award" would go to the perpetually unfinished open-source Radeon driver.
(No) thanks for the award; it's very rewarding and motivating for the people who've put effort into improving those drivers, isn't it.</sarcasm>
There's no question that as far as features and performance are concerned, currently no free drivers compare to the major IHV proprietary drivers. However, it's quite disappointing to have to read something like the above on this site, from someone who judging from his other comments seemed to have some appreciation for what free software is (not) about.
Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 Posted May 18, 2009 20:32 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yeah. It's embarrassing to have drivers that have Just Worked on every
Radeon card I've tried them on for the last eight years.
The trick is to look for those cards that already work reasonably well,
(but you know that of course)
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