Write to NVIDIA

Posted Oct 17, 2006 14:39 UTC (Tue) by ajross (guest, #4563)
In reply to: Write to NVIDIA by cate
Parent article: Local root exploit in NVidia driver

"nvidia's drivers, as they are currently the best video drivers available for linux at any price."...
"What part of "root exploit" did you miss? That automatically disqualifies them from even running for "best video driver"."...
"Performance is not a valid reason to qualify "best driver"."...

This is an apples-to-oranges argument. The NVIDIA drivers are "best" to some folks because they are fast, stable, and very featureful. They are they only drivers available under linux that have the features (OpenGL extensions & 2.0 shaders) you get with the windows drivers, period. To people doing 3D development under linux (most of us at www.flightgear.org, for example), they are honestly the only reasonable choice. Bugs in the ATI and x.org drivers appear regularly. There's a very common one right now (we see it routinely on IRC, not sure which distros are affected) where trying to run an indirect GL client when an improper xorg.conf setup causes a client crash.

People not doing 3D development don't likely care about the output of glxinfo and just want their 2D desktop and the occasional (pre-compiled and tested by someone else) 3D program to be stable and work. These folks can get acceptable use out of the existing free drivers. But to pretend that that makes them "just as good" as the NVIDIA drivers is a little delusional. They aren't.

Now, does that make it "OK" that NVIDIA's drivers are non-free, or excuse the root hole? Of course not. But please don't confuse the issue by arguing two things at the same time. NVIDIA's drivers have features that some of us need, and that are simply not yet available from free software.

Write to NVIDIA

Posted Oct 17, 2006 16:00 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

> To people doing 3D development under linux (most of us at www.flightgear.org, for example), they are honestly the only reasonable choice.

Horsepucky. The open source ati drivers are just fine for running flightgear, and as far as development goes, it doesn't matter what graphics you have for compiling. Might make a slight difference if you're building models, but I doubt it.

I will freely admit that you do need a decent 3D card and drivers to run FlightGear -- I replaced my ancient generic PCI video card (1 frame per second) with an ATI 9250-based, 256MB AGP card (typically about 40 fps, higher at night ;-), with everything else the same) for that very reason.

> NVIDIA's drivers have features that some of us need,

Need? Really? Want, perhaps. Especially if you're doing development rather than running applications -- fast compilers aside, developers (of mass audience apps) shouldn't be targeting bleeding edge hardware, it skews their perspective. Come up with creative solutions to make the app fast/dazzling/whatever on mediocre hardware and you'll make more people happy. (Personally as far as FlightGear goes, I'd just as soon see less effort spent on making clouds look more real, and more done on making the scenery look more like the places I've actually flown, or at least make the documentation better so that I can figure out how to incorporate photos into the scenery myself. Although to be honest I haven't spent a lot of time on that yet.)