Alan writes:
There is one valid point that has been brought up. If you do get kernel panics and the kernel developers and you mention that you are using the closed source drivers, they will use it as an excuse to deny coverage. (As well as vent hostility.) I can understand their point to an extent, but it is not helpful getting the problem solved. Unless you can show that the fault is in the driver, then it is just an excuse to get out of looking at the problem.
I'm afraid that you have it backwards. It's not the kernel developers' responsibility to prove that the fault is in the driver. There's no way for them to prove that, since they do not have the access to the source. If you're having problems and you have Nvidia's binary blob loaded, and if YOU are the one asking for help, then YOU have to prove that the problem is not caused by it. And the only way to do it is to remove the module, and see if you can reproduce it. That's what the kernel developers will tell you.
I hope that you're not naive enough to believe that all that the video driver does is draw pretty pictures on the video card. That only shows a lack of understanding of the overall system infrastructure. In order to do what it does, Nvidia's binary blobs has to hook into most major kernel subsystem components, such as memory management, I/O and interrupt handling, and others. For example, many video chipsets use shared memory, so the video driver needs a tentacle inserted into core memory management routines, so that it can allocate memory pages for the card's video buffers. Or, to allocate pages for DMA I/O, for example, and that's applicable to pretty much every chipset. If there's a bug in Nvidia's module, it can affect any and all parts of the kernel.
So, it's not as cut and dry as some simple minds imagine it to be, so if a kernel crashes with the Nvidia's kernel module loaded, you'll have to get technical support from them, since only they know what their binary blob does to the kernel. And this is not really singling out Nvidia, the same aplpies to any non-free kernel module.
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