Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 9:07 UTC (Wed) by Priscus (guest, #72409)
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

(This comes from someone who does not use Fedora, and may say obvious or stupid things)

Would it be acceptable to keep a LTS kernel in Fedora (it may already be there, for all I know), and ask the packagers of the proprietary drivers to set a dependency on the LTS kernel specifically?
That way, the "free" community could work as intended, and the "proprietary" crowd would avoid breakage.
Of course, the "proprietary" machines would not have all the greatest and latest by default, but the knowledgeable users would still be able to force-install: whether that is a good idea or not would be their choice and responsibility.

Would this work and be an acceptable compromise?

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 9:23 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (3 responses)

> Would it be acceptable to keep a LTS kernel in Fedora (it may already be there, for all I know), and ask the packagers of the proprietary drivers to set a dependency on the LTS kernel specifically?

That was part of the discussion on the devel mailing list but LTS releases rarely align with Fedora's release schedule and the two kernel maintainers are too overworked to maintain their own.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Oct 5, 2017 1:34 UTC (Thu) by khm (subscriber, #108825) [Link] (2 responses)

>That was part of the discussion on the devel mailing list but LTS releases rarely align with Fedora's release schedule and the two kernel maintainers are too overworked to maintain their own.

If you can't integrate updates to the foundational unit of the operating system, it sounds like your release schedule is what's broken, not the legal framework around a video card driver.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Oct 5, 2017 1:56 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

Um, the ones having problem integrating updates to "foundational units of the operating system" are the makers of said proprietary video driver.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Oct 5, 2017 16:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also, there are lots of "foundational units", and they have distinct release schedules. You can't align to kernel releases *and* X.org releases *and* glibc releases *and* GNOME releases *and* KDE releases *and* Firefox releases *and* LibreOffice releases without releasing every other day.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 16:54 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

The way it should work now is that if you boot to a kernel that can't support Nvidia proprietary drivers it should default to the nouveau driver so that users don't get a useless system.

Then users should be able to boot to the previous good kernel, which doesn't get uninstalled during the upgrade, so they can get their proprietary drivers back. They can then file bugs to get the Nvidia driver working on newer kernels.

The problem with LTS kernels is that there are a lot of things that depend on new kernels. For example Fedora/Redhat switched relatively recently to using overlayfs2 for docker... if that isn't supported in the LTS kernel (I don't know if it is or if it is not) then that means that users will be forced to configure docker-storage-setup differently depending on the video card driver they use, which is kinda insane if you think about it.

Other things could crop as well, such as bad or old Intel support for laptops that support dual video cards, wifi drivers being old, or a dozen other issues.

For a distribution like Fedora that is more 'cutting edge' I will happily take have to occasionally booting into the previous know good kernel and filing bug reports rather then having Fedora trying to manage a very old and a very new kernel in the same OS installs.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 13:52 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

Booting previous kernels doesn't always work properly though. In the Fedora 10 timeframe (I forget which Fedora release... it was years ago) my notebook constantly had problems with new kernels and Fedora was removing the old kernels. Basically, every 4 out of 5 releases broke my network or graphics. Old kernels weren't kept around and I had to finally figure out that a yum option would let me keep all old kernels forever... that option isn't set by default.

More recently, my F25 installation stopped working after a kernel update. Something to do with the proprietary nvidia driver I was using from rpmfusion - it wouldn't install or would but wouldn't load, or loaded but didn't work - I'm not really sure. Booting to the previous kernel didn't help. The desktop was super super slow - think 60s to move a mouse cursor half-way across the screen. I had to upgrade the entire distro to 26 to get a newer kernel which had working nouveau drivers for my graphics card (a 10-series nvidia card).

In short, relying on previous kernels is dubious at best when we're talking about dodgy drivers. It's a band-aid that doesn't always work and is only understandable by people with a developer's mindset. If Fedora aims to be useful to more than just developers, efforts to avoid breakage are always appreciated.