F7 nvidia-96xx driver problem

[Sam Varshavchik]

Ed Greshko writes:

> Frank Cox wrote:
>> On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:15:52 +0800
>> Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm not trivializing your experiences, just saying that not all people share
>>> your experiences and it may be best to note that in your replies.
>> 
>> I can't disagree with your statement here, but that's really not the point that
>> Mr. Friedman has been incorrectly asserting.
> 
> All I can say is that I do not recall any instance of someone posting
> problems here on the Fedora list with the open "nv" driver any anyone
> jumping in with a fix.

I don't recall anyone posting problems here with the open "nv" driver, 
period.

But that's not the point. The point that if someone did post a similar 
problem, then most people, myself or anyone else for that matter, could at 
least look at it, and do some poking to eliminate the most common problems. 
At the very least one could locate where any error messages are coming from, 
in the source code, which would narrow down, somewhat, the problem's domain. 
If the "nv" driver was crashing and taking down all of X.org, as a result, a 
backtrace can also be obtained, against pointing the finger in the general 
direction of the culprit.

None of the above is possible with the non-free binary blob. What kind of 
diagnostics can you do with it? Bupkis, that's what. Oh, there may be some 
rudimentary peeking and prodding one might be able to do, perhaps. But not 
to any extent the same level of debugging one can do with free drivers.

Last year, Mesa began crashing and taking down all of X, on an old Voodoo 
card that I have in one box. Yes, an old Voodoo card still had more than 
adequate accelerated OpenGL driver support -- more than enough to run MythTV 
on it. After taking down the backtrace, and dumping some additional debug 
info into the right Bugzilla, a few months later someone found the bug and 
fixed it.

Imagine that. Now what would be the chances of taking an old Nvidia card, 
for which Nvidia has discontinued all official support in their binary 
drivers -- because they want you, of course, to buy their latest heat 
dissipator -- and have anyone do /anything/ about this kind of a problem? I 
give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.

And /that/ is precisely the point. The original poster, I'm afraid, is 
royally boned. If he can't find the right toggles and prods to twiddle in 
his BIOS configuration, or some obscure X setting, he's boned.

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