Every kernel update breaks the nvidia binary drivers.

[ubersoft]

Re: Every kernel update breaks the nvidia binary drivers.

remember, this is testing and development stuff we are using, and even at this point you will have to expect this sort of breakage, as many things are still in flux until everything is in feature-freeze, etc at the rc stage.

Well, this is as good a time as any to address that one.

I'm fully aware of what "alpha" and "beta" mean. An alpha product crashing my desktop or forcing me to re-install a partition isn't a concept that offends me, and if I thought that was all this was I'd gripe a little (because complaining is fun) and that'd be the end of it.

But alphas and betas do more than just test new software -- they can also reveal the future direction of a development effort. And my concern, here, is that development is going in a direction where if you have an nvidia card then nouveau will by-God be your driver whether you want it or not.

Removing or working around nouveau in order to install the binary drivers is not a trivial matter. doc updates grub to block the driver from loading. I had to wipe all trace of it from my machine, found that updating the kernel brought it back, and after doing a complete reinstall found that in the next update kubuntu was trying to put pieces of what I went through a great deal of time and effort to remove back on my machine. All the evidence I see points to an enthusiasm for nouveau that has reached a level where it might as well be mandated on the site.

That has nothing to do with alpha or beta quality code. If my fears are realized -- and I hope they aren't -- then nouveau will continue to be a never-ending struggle after Lucid goes gold.

There was once a time when the ndiswrapper packages stopped working -- I had to download the source and compile it in order to get ndiswrapper to load my wireless card drivers. At that time an official statement from the ubuntu developers said "we don't like ndiswrapper, we think it's a hack and an ugly one at that, ubuntu will be using kernel drivers for wireless and we're not going to try to make ndiswrapper work." All well and good, except that it took TWO RELEASES after that before the design they LIKED actually recognized the wireless card on my laptop.

I love the idea of nouveau. I'm very happy that it's come so far, and I will be overjoyed when a fully functional nouveau/gallium combination allows me to use an open source driver with 3d support on my laptop. But I don't want nouveau to be the design they like that will take two full releases before it actually works for me, especially if it keeps re-asserting itself every time there's an update. That's too much trouble and that's about a year before I can actually start using 3d on my laptop again. At that point I'll just have to find another distro, which is something of a problem because I haven't had much luck with any of the others.

So to reiterate -- I understand the risks of alpha and beta products... that's just new code and unstable integration. That stuff gets ironed out. Nouveau potentially represents a new design focus that will affect users above and beyond whether or not the software is being tested... I hope you all can see why that would concern me.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Every kernel update breaks the nvidia binary drivers.

But alphas and betas do more than just test new software -- they can also reveal the future direction of a development effort.

My comment:

I have two persistent problems, that have been reported as bugs, and have not been addressed at all. One is the rather irritating inability to use any live CDs since Jaunty. And the other is this video driver thing -- none of the 195's will load on any kernels since -31, on any debian-based distribution. The concern here is not that something is just broken -- we accept that in any software, beta or otherwise. The concern is that it indicates a change in the way software works that makes it incompatible with my system.

It's the pattern of breakage that is worrisome to me. These problems seem to exist throughout the whole debian family, and that says to me that the software distribution itself has changed in such a way that I may no longer be able to use it. I have put a lot of effort into getting this stuff to work, and I'd like to think I can rely on it to work in the future. But it is not looking that way at this point. The software isn't just broken, it is broken in a way that suggests it has changed permanently, or at least until attention is called to the problem, and is addressed by developers.

My bug report on launchpad on the 195 drivers was marked "invalid" by a triager who evidently didn't read my whole post, and knee-jerked on the mention of the proprietary driver. That's not going to get this solved, and at this point, I'm not sure what will.