Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29 [LWN.net]

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 16:53 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

Agreed. I had some stability problems a few years ago, but that was when manually enabling options clearly marked as experimental (IIRC it was when the option to enable damage and composite with GLX was first added). Since then every system crash I might have blamed on it has turned out to be caused by hardware problems.

Still get some graphical corruption with KDE4, mind :P

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 23, 2009 7:03 UTC (Thu) by epeeist (guest, #1743) [Link]

"Still get some graphical corruption with KDE4, mind :P"

So did I, it would seem to be some contention between KDE and the NVidia driver when trying to do anti-aliasing.

I changed the anti-alias configuration setting of the driver to allow it override the application setting and this seems to have fixed the problem.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:09 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (4 responses)

> The "binary nVidia driver crashes your kernel" bit is FUD, IMO.

I'm not sure. When the nvidia driver needed to be rebuilt against your kernel every time you upgraded, the Red Hat mailing lists were submerged with mails complaining that the kernel upgrade had crashed their machine (in fact, X hadn't started).

The same thing happened with upgrading to the next version of the distribution which upgraded your kernel but didn't rebuild the nvidia driver to match.

Feel free to argue that this isn't a crash, per se but the heart of the matter is that a) users didn't like it and b) it happened with the nvidia driver, not the nv one.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:57 UTC (Wed) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (3 responses)

Please... you're blaming nVidia because the kernel doesn't have a stable API, and thus when users use the nVidia driver then update their kernel the driver stops working? And calling this a crash, or somehow a symptom of instability?

First, when you install third part software it sometimes breaks when you update your distro (or even just parts of your distro). Whose fault this is isn't even important, it happens, but it's certainly not a "Crash".

Second, the kernel's no-stable-abi/api nonsense is hardly nVidia's fault. Any out-of-tree drivers will have this problem. nVidia just happens to be the poster-boy for this particular issue.

Finally, the X server has been pretty pathetic about video driver selection; in Windows there are often fallbacks so that if one driver can't be loaded something else is, so that you at least get SOME display. X? zip. nothing. Just a console. nVidia's fault? hardly.

Dont' get me wrong, I can't wait for the nouveau guys to fix everything that's wrong with nVidia's driver. But "stability"? that's not one of the things.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 23:13 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> Please... you're blaming nVidia because the kernel doesn't have a stable API, and thus when users use the nVidia driver then update their kernel the driver stops working?

No, I'm blaming nVidia because they refuse to publish the source to their driver which prevents the open source community from shipping a rebuilt version along with every new kernel.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 23, 2009 11:08 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> Finally, the X server has been pretty pathetic about video driver
selection; in Windows there are often fallbacks so that if one driver
can't be loaded something else is, so that you at least get SOME display.
X? zip. nothing. Just a console. nVidia's fault? hardly.

The console /is/ the fallback, in that case. It's the ultimate "safe
mode".

Meanwhile, I agree with Seyman, no need to blame nVidia for the kernel
policy, when they could simply release decent specs and let the community
handle it at far less trouble than they are going to (despite nVidia) with
the nouveau driver.

FWIW, I did run the nVidia driver when I first got serious about switching
to Linux, because while I had done enough pre-buy (pre-switch) research to
know nVidia had Linux drivers and that they worked with TwinView, but I
had unfortunately NOT groked the difference (again, while doing pre-switch
research still on MS Windows) between unfreedomware Linux drivers and
freedomware Linux drivers.

It didn't take me long to figure it out tho once I switched, tho, as those
separate recompiles (I was building my own kernel before I had even chosen
my Linux mail client) got old VERY quickly, and that was the last
proprietaryware needing card I ever bought (and will ever buy, if I have
anything to say about it). I very quickly decided I did NOT dump a decade
of experience on proprietaryware just to continue to be subject to the
mastery of unfreedomware on Linux, as well. If I were to subject myself
to that, what was the point of dumping all that experience to start over
again? Not much. That one taste of freedom was all it took.

Duncan (I'll close with the quote I use as a sig on the mailing lists,
that I referred to above with that "subject to the mastery of
unfreedomware" bit.)

"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 23, 2009 16:37 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

There is nothing at all wrong with the instability of Linux kernel internal interfaces. They refuse to have their hands tied in order to fix bugs and improve things. We all reap the benefits.

If you think this is bad (obviously), then why don't you go over to OpenSolaris or FreeBSD and stop insisting that something is wrong with Linux?

Whether or not you think it's reasonable for the Linux developers to alter the Linux kernel, it's certainly unreasonable to ship end user drivers which repeatedly fail in this environment.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:24 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

I wholeheartedly agree. I have seen so much more soft bricking (=no permanent hardware damage) or broken/unsupported features with e.g. VIA hardware and the free drivers that exist for it. And I am not even talking 3d.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:58 UTC (Wed) by joey (guest, #328) [Link] (2 responses)

kerneloops.org has broad data that differs with your personal ancedote. nv_* is frequently in the top ten causes of oopsen there.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 23, 2009 21:05 UTC (Thu) by gcallow (guest, #4316) [Link]

True, but i915_* and radeon_* also figure prominently. I don't believe kerneloops.org provides
conclusive evidence that the Free graphics drivers are any more reliable than nvidia. My own
(subjective) experiences with a number of i915 and nvidia machines are similar. Both run pretty
well, but the intel machines aren't immune to problems.

Personally I think the claim of FUD has some merit. The nvidia driver isn't perfect, but I don't see
evidence that the Free drivers are doing a significantly better job, and nvidia have demonstrably
better performance.

If you want to use only Free software, then fine. If you're unhappy with the additional maintenance
overhead, or the fact that nvidia drop support for older cards out of newer drivers then that's also
fine. However, If you want to claim the nvidia drivers are bug-ridden and imply that the Free
drivers are intrinsically more reliable then, at the moment, I don't think the evidence is there.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 30, 2009 10:55 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

Well, kerneloops doesn't include much data from real crashes, since it's usually too late for automatic submit of crash log once the machine completely stops responding. Well, you can grab the panic message via serial console and post it to bugzilla or mailing list, but nobody does that for nvidia drivers for obvious reason.

Secondly, most kerneloops data is collected from bleeding edge and development releases. More reports from non-nvidia hardware generally mean more development is happening there.

When it comes to stable Linux-based OS-es, let's consider RHEL 5 (I haven't used other comparable OS-es, but I believe most widely used enterprise-class distribution is a pretty good example). ATi and Intel works mostly flawlessly there compared to NVidia, which for example can not resume from suspend, or freezes for minutes (on T61, again fairly common platform). And no, no kerneloops messages were sent for it.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 22, 2009 22:49 UTC (Wed) by flammon (guest, #807) [Link]

FUD! You've gotta to be kidding. Here's a nice list of people who have been dealing with crashes for the last 5 months.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123912

Nvidia drivers have been crashing most systems that I've worked on for the past year. Just because you have a combination of hardware that doesn't crash, lucky for you, doesn't mean that it's FUD. It's real. Go ahead buy yourself an HP G60 laptop with an nvidia 8200, install your favourite distribution and the latest stable nvidia drivers and I'll eat my shorts if it doesn't crash.

Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29

Posted Apr 26, 2009 11:31 UTC (Sun) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link]

<i>Note that free drivers ever brick hardware.</i>

Yup: there was a period a while back when the i2c drivers would brick some IBM laptops. Then there was the mess with the Intel network cards...

Hardware isn't perfect, and there's always the risk that you tickle an edge case that does something permanent, even if you're doing things strictly by the book (assuming you have the docs at all).