Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 [LWN.net]

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:30 UTC (Wed) by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
In reply to: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 by sbergman27
Parent article: Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

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.

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Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 23:55 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #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.