Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 15:04 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033)
In reply to: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers by mcatanzaro
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Additionally:

* The Workstation WG didn't even discuss the kernel 4.13 update yet, much less make any decision. This article describes my prediction as to what could happen if it were to come up on the agenda.

* I dropped my objection to the kernel update once it was determined that affected users will still be able to boot into a graphical environment successfully, since there's a working fallback to the noveau driver. So even I now agree that the kernel update is fine.

It should really not be controversial that a mid-release update that causes users' previously-working computers to no longer boot is unacceptable under any circumstances. If an update breaks users' computers, we lose those users to Ubuntu. And nobody honestly cares what kernel version they're running, as long as their hardware works. So if a new kernel *were* to seriously break users (and this one doesn't), then it really ought to wait until the next Fedora release: just like kernel upgrades have to wait in every other distro.

P.S. I *really* wish we could say that Nvidia's crap proprietary driver was not supported, but that's just not the world we live in... not if we want the Fedora community to continue growing.

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 18:08 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (1 responses)

> So if a new kernel *were* to seriously break users (and this one doesn't), then it really ought to wait until the next Fedora release: just like kernel upgrades have to wait in every other distro.

That's not a solution unless the old kernel version gets updates from the distro.

I have not tried to maintain a kernel release, but I know that having to support multiple versions of any software will require multiple times the maintenance resources. So the resources would have to be there or else you'd be trading some users being unable to boot new kernels to *all* users being vulnerable to security holes.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 16:21 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

That's true.

One could argue that the solution is to just stick to LTS kernels. But in this case, it turns out that we have a working fallback to noveau when the proprietary driver breaks, so it's fine to just keep shipping the latest kernels.