Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 27, 2017 16:54 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers by Priscus
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

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.

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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.