On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 08:16 -0700, Lonni J Friedman wrote: > On 7/5/06, Scott R. Godin <scott.g@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Nowhere in this discussion have I seen "nvidia attempting to help" -- in > > point of fact, in the experience of others, which I have witnessed > > second and third hand, user bug reports get largely ignored in the > > general scheme of things. It's only the large corporate customers whose > > bugs get fixed in anything resembling a timely fashion. I'd love to see > > that change, but, that'll happen right around the time it goes > > open-source. :-P > > Surely you're joking. I've submitted many bugs to Redhat's bugzilla > for software that ships in their releases (both RHEL & FC), and very > few of them ever see any attention. Redhat bows before their large > corporate customers just like NVIDIA. You're deceiving yourself if > you think otherwise. You'll note most carefully that the only attention my bug submission to livna's bugzilla recieved was to state that they don't follow up with vendors of proprietary packages. Likewise similarly this would apply if I filed it with Red Hat, most particularly since *it is not their package*. However security related bugs and urgent showstopping bugs with packages they DO ship with the product do recieve attention including that of the package's upstream developers. (if you read any of the changelogs in stuff downloaded from yum update, you'll notice the word 'upstream' appearing quite often.) When I file a bug report with bugzilla I don't expect an immediate response. When they get to it is fine with me, as long as they do get to it, which has been the case with every other one I've ever filed. lftp download.fedora.redhat.com:/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/SRPMS> ls |wc -l 381 as you can see, they aren't twiddling their thumbs either, considering they have more than one release to backport bugfixes for. > > It's only the REST of the system that suffered because of it. > > o Horribly corrupted rpm databases? Huh? > > o Trashed swap partition (how the HELL did that happen?) > > o Perms on /etc/rc.d/ and /etc/rc.d/init.d/ suddenly being 0644 > > instead of 0755 (explain that one, if you can) .. > > o memory errors on DRAM that's passed memtest86 running all night (at > > least 10 full test-suites, if not more), 100% cleanly? > > What proof do you have that the nvidia X driver caused this? Thus far > your only response was pointing to Mike Harris' personal FUD campaign > against binary drivers. It seems to have escaped your notice that *I* did not post the link to Mike's discussion (I fail to see how you managed to read a 'personal FUD campaign' into what seems to me to be a fairly reasoned and rational discussion post). But anyway, the answer to your other question is simply this, I continually had problems through no less than FIVE COMPLETE RE-INSTALLS of Fedora Core 5 UNTIL I stopped including kmod_nvidia as part of that process about a month ago, SOLELY after speaking with a few people online on irc.freenode.net (one of whom happened to be mike, along with some other redhat-employed folks I've known for a few years) about the kernel errors and what I needed to do to fix the drive problems (rpm -Va while I was diagnosing something completely different evidently caused by the memory corruption I was experiencing (the file perms thing among others, shown above), died suddenly, generating the results shown in pastebin linked below, as you can see: look for 'rpmv') via fsck and distinctly recall being asked if I had any non-redhat packages installed. As it turned out I have two: my wireless ethernet drivers, and kmod_nvidia. After the arduous triple manual fsck I removed kmod_nvidia and re-installed some of the rpms connected to the damaged files on / with the same packages as before. the ONLY thing different about the current system from the five previous installs is the absense of kmod_nvidia. Draw your own conclusions. I used a big fat black sharpie to draw mine. (on the back of 27 8x10 color glossy photos...)[1] > > All sorts of 'general weirdness' that crept in gradually over _months_, > > each re-install eventually resulting in different problems (some of > > which I've casually grouped together above, but none of these occurred > > during the same install. Each install was the eventual result of one of > > the above (plus a few others) after I noticed it and did my careful best > > to correct and preserve a system that I use on a daily basis.) > > > > If you saw this: > > > > http://phpfi.com/125284 > > > > Would the video drivers be the first place (or the second? the fourth? > > top ten?) you looked for the culprit? No? funny thing, *neither would > > I*... nevertheless nvidia was indeed the source of this and other > > strange problems. And that's the *only* time out of the five that I got > > anything conclusive recorded as far as error messages that indicated > > *something* was horribly wrong (_before_ things *went* completely > > wahooni-shaped forcing a reinstall), and led me to a real, practical, > > restored to full functionality, solution. > > Again, what proof do you have that the nvidia X driver caused that > crash? As you, yourself, noted, the nvidia kernel module is no where > to be found in that backtrace. Yes I know. Strange, is it not? memtest86 ran _overnight_ showed nothing wrong with the memory sticks. Yet uninstalling kmod_nvidia has proven the solution solely on the basis of the fact that my system is no longer gradually going wahooni-shaped. Again, you are free to draw your own conclusions. I am doing nothing different with this system today than I was doing months ago except more of it. (more local-only vhosts for preflight website testing, more files in /home, more yum updates downloaded, etc.) > > So please, spare me. If it works for you, great. I'm happy for you. > > _Proceed with caution_. That road, however well-traveled, is not > > well-paved. > > At this point, you sound like a troll with an axe to grind. At this point I sound *exactly* like a user thoroughly frustrated with having to re-install an otherwise utterly stable system _multiple times over the past year_ (which costs me money in downtime as I cannot work while the system's fubered) due to untraceable mysterious failures in the system -- NONE of which showed any connection to the errors occuring during the NEXT complete wipe-and-install (and the next. and the next. and the next. shall I go on?), who is overjoyed at having found out what the problem REALLY was, and mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-it-anymore[2] with Nvidia for making it difficult and unrewarding *for anyone including the package maintainers* (unless you're waving truckloads of money at them) to talk to them about bugs in their driver. Coincidence? Highly doubtful. This tale of woe also happens to include different versions of kmod_nvidia as Nvidia released a new version of their driver somewhere in between when I first upgraded from FC4 to FC5 and the present. This is a cautionary tale, nothing more. Do whatever you want, but you cannot say I didn't try to warn you. I sincerely hope it works better for others than it did for me, but the more my uptime continues to improve, the happier I am and the more convinced I become that I made the right choice. The ONLY way you'll convince me that it wasn't kmod_nvidia is if it happens again, and I find that _even more_ unlikely than you seeing any connection between that pastebin and kmod_nvidia. :D *** [1] Cheers to anyone who groks the reference. [2] Or this one. Great movie.
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