Re: Announce: ndiswrapper

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Thu Nov 20 2003 - 00:32:20 EST




William Lee Irwin III wrote:

William Lee Irwin III wrote:

I'm not convinced it is good for end users. They _think_ they're
getting something that's supported by Linux, but are instead getting
something highly problematic that ties them to specific kernel
versions and cuts off most, if not all, avenues of support available.


On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 03:59:46PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

Well what they get is hardware accelerated 3d graphics under Linux.
If they didn't need 3d, they can use the open source drivers.
If someone downloads and installs the drivers themselves, they should
know enough to contact nvidia for support (I think nvidia have been
pretty good). Others will contact their ditro support.


"cuts off most, if not all, avenues of support available" == any and
all problems with the things around are untraceable. We won't touch
tainted bugreports and rightly so. And nvidia isn't supporting the
whole kernel.



I guess they're tracable for nvidia. I'm not aware of how nvidia
Linux development works. I assumed from the lack of bug reports that
they had done something about it. I concede that bad support from
a vendor might cause a bad perception of Linux.


On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 03:59:46PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

There might be a problem where they percieve that Linux is unstable
while it is actually binary drivers.


Yes, that's one I'm very concerned about.


Bad problem.



William Lee Irwin III wrote:

It's very much a second-class flavor of open source. They dare not
change the kernel version lest the binary-only trainwreck explode.
They dare not run with the whiz-bang patches going around they're
interested in lest the binary-only trainwreck explode. It may oops
in mainline, and all they can do is wait for a tech support line to
answer. Well, they're a little better than that, they have hackers
out and about, but you're still stuck waiting for a specific small
set of individuals and lose all of the "many eyes" advantages.


On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 03:59:46PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

I must say that I've been using the same nvidia drivers on my desktop
system for maybe a year, and never had a crash including going through
countless versions of 2.5/6. True you need to recompile the intermediate
layer, but then, nobody who knows less than me will know or care about
kernel versions. Their distro will upgrade kernel+drivers if needed, and
presumably the distro has done some sort of testing / QA.


They're rather sensitive to VM changes, and I've had people with
significantly less know-how than either of us come back after trying VM
patches in combination with nvidia stuff report things ranging from
oopsen, to reboots, to fs corruption. The insulation layers are only
partially effective at best. And end-users are fiddling with whiz bang
patches for their kernels and upgrading versions by means other than
distros. Heck, the distros aren't even shipping 2.6, and they're
running 2.6 plus patches.


I didn't mean that in an elitist way (you shouldn't be compiling
kernels unless you are taller than the sign) - I just mean the knowledge
required to recompile the kernel and nvidia drivers. And the people
with that know how should generally know that the binary modules
can be unstable. Again I concede this won't always be the case.


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