PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica:
"NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."
Well, consider the fact that without reliable drivers, it doesn't matter how good their chips are. Shipping a video card with bad drivers that are difficult to fix/upgrade/replace is as bad, if not worse, than shipping sub-standard hardware with good drivers.
I prefer to look at it this way: The good folks at NVIDIA obviously aren't doing a perfect job, so why can't they enlist some (free) help? With the proper specifications in hand*, anything is possible. So I dare to say "yes", a thousand geeks with free time to burn can certainly do better.
As for the OP's crack about opening the drivers themselves, NVIDIA needs a massive reality check: they're in the *hardware* business - the drivers just make their cards more marketable. And given that those drivers are known to be a major PITA on some environments (Linux and now Vista), it certainly isn't helping their position.
(* Yea, they probably want to guard this with an iron-clad NDA and know all your PII before you sign it. I've always found this to be sparse logic at best since we're just talking about stuff that can be reverse engineered for one, and two, all a developer needs is what bits to set and when; it's not like that crap is necessarily a company's bread-and-butter. )
What's that "oldid" part of that URL? I don't see that in most wikipedia links I follow... you wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one by simply noting that Wikipedia in the past has been defaced (and quickly fixed [wikipedia.org], a whole 15 minutes it was up), yet trot it out as an operational fact, would you? Because that would be dishonest, and I wouldn't think an AC would be dishonest.
Actually, what TFA doesn't say is that the Vista driver instability was done intentionally because they were sick and tired of listening to us Linux users complain. I guess they figured it would be easier to level the playing field rather than to fix the bugs.
I know you say that in jest, but the article states that ATI have 9.3% of the problems. It stands to reason that it is representative of their market share.
The part that seems to have been missed is the fact that Microsoft had 17.9% of the crashes related to their own drivers. IMO this is much more significant and interesting than Nvidia beta drivers crashing and should be the real news here.
I know you say that in jest, but the article states that ATI have 9.3% of the problems. It stands to reason that it is representative of their market share.
This was a little surprising to me as well, but ATI had about 20% of the market during 2007.
It would seem that AMD has managed to turn around their driver's stability and it is better than nVidia's, who apparently has a pretty poor record at the moment.
Now if only they could make their XP drivers suck less.
They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
In my (somewhat limited) experience, the best drivers are those written by a third party. The more complex the hardware, the bigger the hardware and driver teams get. When you have a really complex bit of hardware, like a GPU, you have a huge team of hardware designers (who don't really understand software) and a huge team of driver developers (who don't really understand software). If they are both in house then you generally have pretty poor documentation because both teams have access to the other's work, but not the expertise to understand it fully. The hardware guys all think that the software team can get most of what they need from the HDL, and just fill in the gaps with their documentation.
When a third party is writing the drivers, you don't want them to have access to anything proprietary and so the interfaces need to be very thoroughly documented because the external team isn't allowed to have access to the implementation details at all. A lot of the early XFree86 accelerated drivers were developed in this way and, at the time, were a lot more stable than their Windows counterparts, as were the early Radeon drivers written by the open source community.
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
I remember when the first nForce3 drivers came out that had those IDE problems. And the continuing problem with the SW drivers. Man, I thought something was seriously wrong with my new rig. Nope, just the drivers....
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
At 28.8%, nVidia still has a long way to go to reach the epitome of device driver excellence that is ATI's collection of video drivers. Those extrusions of fecal material have accounted for more cases of alopecia on users than most other kinds of software. I'm actually surprised that the submitter didn't take a swipe at ATI while writing about driver crashes; the urge to do that must've been immense. In fact, ATI driver problems where the single biggest contributor to Jerry Pournelle's best writing ever in Byte Magazine's Chaos Manor column.
This is descending below lawsuit territory, I'm starting to think that the whole PC hardware industry should be taken out back and shot. They supported MS in the release of an OS with crap under-powered hardware with smiles and big adverts, in full knowledge that these systems would never work or just were not ready for Vista.
"The Wow Starts, oh around 2009 if you'll just let us fix this, upgrade that and force you to buy some new stuff" Should have been the tagline for Vista.
> They supported MS in the release of an OS with crap under-powered hardware with smiles and big adverts, in full knowledge that these > systems would never work or just were not ready for Vista. I can assure you, having worked in a place which designs cards and writes drivers for Windows, that the release of a new Microsoft OS is not met with whoops and `alrights` etc. It marks the start of another tedious cycle of testing, fixing and dealing with customer problems. People want to be able to plug in
Nvidia have a shamefully lax attitude to the stability of their drivers even under XP. Try searching google for NV4Disp.dll and you'll see that there is an issue that still causes BSOD's years after it was first reported, ironically the latest drivers only make the issue worse.
This latest news will only make sure that my next card will not be from Nvidia.
28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers
Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Oh wait...
More seriously, I rag on Nvidea for poor Linux support, and this is more of a chance to bash them, but their drivers work fine under XP. If Microsoft provided better documentation of their APIs, as the EU has been demanding, perhaps writing drivers wouldn't be such a pain in the ass?
I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them.
Is closed source closed so that nobody will realise just how abysmally shitty their kludges are?
If your OS crashes, your OS is crap. Microsoft, fix your OS and publish the code. Nvidea, fix your shitty drivers and open the code. Don't give up any rights, just open it.
I'd like to see copyright law changed so that executables can't be copyrighted unless the source is also provided. How can IBM tell what parts of their code they stole from SCO? Of course the answer was "none". Time to reboot copyright law!
I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them.
Only the companies know for sure why they keep it closed-source, but explanations that have been suggested at various times include:
1. The drivers contain code licensed from third-parties, such that opening the source would require extensive contracts, negotiations, and more licensing. Probably most of these third-party software vendors won't agree to have their code opened for the same reasons that all closed-source companies keep their source closed.
2. Modern video cards (and other hardware too, probably) contain a surprising amount of their logic and "acceleration magic" in the driver. The card itself, though dedicated to a particular hardware task, is quite general and thus the code controlling the card contains many of the important 'tricks' to get good performance. (In fact I've been told that the difference between some cards and higher models is only in the driver.) In such cases, releasing the software code would be like releasing the hardware circuit diagram: it would reveal many of their trade secrets (some of which may be patent-protected, others not).
3. Even if it would be illegal, some people would modify and redistribute the code. Hobbyist hackers would alter the code and recompile. This might allow end-users to bypass restrictions on the card, enable other features (effectively upgrade the card by bypassing lockouts), and so on. This makes lock-in harder, and might reduce the frequency that people upgrade their hardware.
4. Their code, in all likelihood, violates a large number of competitor patents. As long as the violations are buried inside a binary, no one will notice. Opening the code would make it easy for a competitor to spot violations and sue. Probably all the companies violate each other's hardware and software patents, but they maintain an uneasy balance by all being secretive. If one company released too much information, the others would use it against them.
5. The company may worry about other liabilities that they become exposed to when users and competitors can peruse the codebase.
As I said, only the companies know for sure. But there are plenty of plausible reasons for why a hardware company wouldn't want to release driver source code. They are not great reasons (many of us would be more willing to buy the hardware if it had more documentation and/or open code), but they make business sense.
Indeed. And its why you had to see internal mails to know that MS were saying it was Nvidia's fault. Considering anytime Windows crash, MS gets the blamed (even if a significant amount of times its not Windows' fault directly...Creative, I'm looking at you), if they felt it REALLY wasn't their fault, they would have said it reeeeally quick.
If they didn't, its partly because they took the blame, as they should.
We're a dell hardware shop. We buy on a 4 year cycle, every machine gets replaced every 4 years with the latest latitude line shipping model of laptop. In this past few cycles they've been NVidia based. They all have 2 gigs of ram, sata hard drives, dual core higher end processors and of course, NVidia Mobile chipsets. So, all 800 people at my company with nvidia chipsets cannot deploy vista until a) the drivers are fixed. b) the hardware cycle comes up in 4 years. All the people getting new machines right now are perfectly happy because the hardware is supported, but just those purchased 6 months ago and before (D820's) are not capable of running vista with dual monitors without gambling on whether or not they will be alive after a weekend on screensaver.
What's comical for Microsoft is that they would go and change the driver models for everyone for their new OS, and then blamed the resultant bugfest from the imposed change over on all of its business partners. Way to go Microsoft! You guys are a bunch of class acts!
Since apparently you can have a class action lawsuit for drivers not working, lets open up the floodgates and punish the manufacturers for not having compatible software! And why stop at video drivers? Lets sue all the makers of legacy hardware. And wifi hardware. Have an OLD 5 1/4 floppy? Sue! Have one of those old HP video-now PCMCIA cards? Sue!
Most of these driver incompatibilities were actually caused because microsoft changed the driver structure at the last minute which basically shot a lot of the manufacturers in the foot at the starting line. If this class action lawsuit goes through... how likely do you think NVidia and ATI are going to be to jump on the bandwagon for Windows 7? I mean, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I can't imagine being the victim of a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit because of microsoft's incompetance is going to make them the best buddies.
Then again, I wonder if nvidia and ati have the right to sue microsoft in response should this current class action lawsuit go through? They developed to the specs microsoft had given them, so if microsoft changed those specs at the last minute... seems kind of uncool to me.
Most of these driver incompatibilities were actually caused because microsoft changed the driver structure at the last minute which basically shot a lot of the manufacturers in the foot at the starting line.
Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation [microsoft.com]. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
That is incorrect for numerous reasons - first, it is utterly false (refer to this article [slashdot.org]). Dell presented court documents that late changes to windows drivers code broke numerous driver packages, so your idea that the changes were documented for 'years' is hogwash. Secondly, the OS that was in development was known as longhorn, which was later scrapped and replaced with a different OS - look up longhorn reloaded.
NVIDIA vs ATI drivers - I don't really care. "It worked for me" - I don't really care. Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care. Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
Well if NVidia is the only one with MAJOR driver problems....lets look at the math. 80% of the drivers work and they were built with the DDK while 20% (including NVidia's drivers) do not work and they were built with the DDK. I would think the 20% did not write their drivers correctly.
Drivers in the kernel tend to work really well... As do the default open source drivers present in Xorg... Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems. It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
The linux drivers for nvidia suck too, nvidia clearly take a long time to get up to speed on new operating systems, it's one reason I no longer use them. Having said that, they're pretty damn solid, so its most likely becuase vistas so mucked up when it comes to drivers.
Well, from my experience (not trolling), but they historically have sucked somewhat less than the ATI drivers, which have been known to cause freezes when switching to a console, etc., due to bugs in the driver, firmware, AMD processors (ironically enough), various chipsets and all sorts of things.
The problem is that in the race to produce the biggest, baddest, fastest, video cards for gamers, ATI/AMD and NVIDIA have often overlooked stability for performance. I don't know about you, but I'd gladly trade off a couple of FPS for a card that was rock solid stable.
Which is why on my Linux box, I prefer having an Intel video card. I don't do much (if any) gaming on it, so graphics don't really matter too much to me. So I would rather have something that was really stable over something that got me 400 FPS (when the refresh rate is only 60-100 Hz).
but they historically have sucked somewhat less than the ATI drivers
LINUX + ATI + Dual Display = BAD!
The 169 series NVIDIA drivers are junk for all operating systems.
LINUX + NVIDIA (100.14.19 driver) + Dual display = YAY!// A round of applause everyone -- I used the Preview button!
So let me get this straight: When X Crashes you lose your current session, right? Which means that OOo document you were working on just went "poof" - your media player shuts down, along with all your other apps that launch within the context of the X session.
Now, your uber OS may have stayed "on" in that it could reload all that crap without having to spend 20 seconds rebooting, but for all intents and purposes from a user perspective, your whole OS just freaking crashed.
Someone has already pointed out that if you want a rock-solid stable video card under Linux, buy a board with an Intel G965 or G33/35 chipset, so I won't make that argument (although I will say the drivers aren't completely rock solid and lack many of the options I'm used to with the nVidia driver, like OGL vsync to stop "tearing" when I play full screen video).
However, I will say that ATI's Linux drivers have come on leaps and bounds since AMD took the helm. They're still sucky, but they now only about twice as sucky as nVidia, as opposed to the binary equivalent of disemboweling yourself with a grapefruit spoon. The fact that, thanks to AMD publishing the specs for the silicon, a fully OSS, clean room, accelerated driver is now possible is also a colossal boon, and I suspect that within a few months the RadeonHD driver will be featureful and stable enough to be more than adequate for most people, once the distros start picking up on it.
Then, of course, it'd be nice if someone could write a way of accelerating video so that all us Linux users without eleventy billion jiggahurtz processors could play back 1080p H.264...
And the NVIDIA XP drivers -- 100% of the crashes of my system (one every couple of days) are down to the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT drivers, even though I've cut the settings down to their most basic. Well, at least now I know for next time.
The linux drivers for nvidia suck too, nvidia clearly take a long time to get up to speed on new operating systems, it's one reason I no longer use them. Having said that, they're pretty damn solid, so its most likely becuase vistas so mucked up when it comes to drivers.
I got a fanless NVidia 7600GS, installed the restricted drivers for it (maybe even updated it, don't rememer). No problems at all. Runs my dual monitor setup *WAY* better than my Win 2k3 machine.
I used to dread that double blue arrow icon on package-updater. It used to mean a good hour or two of searching, downloading, compiling Nvidia driver files (those NVIDIA*.run files) and editing/etc/X11/xorg.conf to get the driver working. Always having to change the module name "nv" to "nvidia", and making sure the screen resolutions were there. At least now there is a installable kernel module which eliminates the hassle now.
Now upgrading from one release to another is just a matter of ensuring that every
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:
"In Windows NT 4.0, drivers were moved into kernel mode to improve performance. However, when a kernel-mode driver fails, it can crash an entire system, whereas the failure of a user-mode driver causes only the current process to crash."
In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
They might have more direct knowledge of the hardware, but there is strength in numbers.
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Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you are saying 1.000.000 knowledgeable geeks would be working to fix the driver ? Talk about wishful thinking.
I say 10, at most.
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Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Informative)
I prefer to look at it this way: The good folks at NVIDIA obviously aren't doing a perfect job, so why can't they enlist some (free) help? With the proper specifications in hand*, anything is possible. So I dare to say "yes", a thousand geeks with free time to burn can certainly do better.
As for the OP's crack about opening the drivers themselves, NVIDIA needs a massive reality check: they're in the *hardware* business - the drivers just make their cards more marketable. And given that those drivers are known to be a major PITA on some environments (Linux and now Vista), it certainly isn't helping their position.
(* Yea, they probably want to guard this with an iron-clad NDA and know all your PII before you sign it. I've always found this to be sparse logic at best since we're just talking about stuff that can be reverse engineered for one, and two, all a developer needs is what bits to set and when; it's not like that crap is necessarily a company's bread-and-butter. )
</rant>
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Re:MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:4, Insightful)
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Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh....wait.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, at least we got through to them.
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WARNING - Shock site (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:WARNING - Shock site (Score:5, Funny)
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Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The part that seems to have been missed is the fact that Microsoft had 17.9% of the crashes related to their own drivers. IMO this is much more significant and interesting than Nvidia beta drivers crashing and should be the real news here.
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
GPU Market Share
=================
Intel 37.6%
Nvidia 32.6%
AMD 19.5%
Source: http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9752280-37.html [news.com]
It would seem that AMD has managed to turn around their driver's stability and it is better than nVidia's, who apparently has a pretty poor record at the moment.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
When a third party is writing the drivers, you don't want them to have access to anything proprietary and so the interfaces need to be very thoroughly documented because the external team isn't allowed to have access to the implementation details at all. A lot of the early XFree86 accelerated drivers were developed in this way and, at the time, were a lot more stable than their Windows counterparts, as were the early Radeon drivers written by the open source community.
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O RLY? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when the first nForce3 drivers came out that had those IDE problems. And the continuing problem with the SW drivers. Man, I thought something was seriously wrong with my new rig. Nope, just the drivers....
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
At 28.8%, nVidia still has a long way to go to reach the epitome of device driver excellence that is ATI's collection of video drivers. Those extrusions of fecal material have accounted for more cases of alopecia on users than most other kinds of software. I'm actually surprised that the submitter didn't take a swipe at ATI while writing about driver crashes; the urge to do that must've been immense. In fact, ATI driver problems where the single biggest contributor to Jerry Pournelle's best writing ever in Byte Magazine's Chaos Manor column.
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The ow starts now (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Wow Starts, oh around 2009 if you'll just let us fix this, upgrade that and force you to buy some new stuff" Should have been the tagline for Vista.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> systems would never work or just were not ready for Vista.
I can assure you, having worked in a place which designs cards and writes drivers for Windows, that the release of a new Microsoft OS is not met with whoops and `alrights` etc. It marks the start of another tedious cycle of testing, fixing and dealing with customer problems. People want to be able to plug in
Nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
I'm relieved (Score:5, Interesting)
Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Oh wait...
More seriously, I rag on Nvidea for poor Linux support, and this is more of a chance to bash them, but their drivers work fine under XP. If Microsoft provided better documentation of their APIs, as the EU has been demanding, perhaps writing drivers wouldn't be such a pain in the ass?
I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them.
Is closed source closed so that nobody will realise just how abysmally shitty their kludges are?
If your OS crashes, your OS is crap. Microsoft, fix your OS and publish the code. Nvidea, fix your shitty drivers and open the code. Don't give up any rights, just open it.
I'd like to see copyright law changed so that executables can't be copyrighted unless the source is also provided. How can IBM tell what parts of their code they stole from SCO? Of course the answer was "none". Time to reboot copyright law!
-mcgrew
Re:I'm relieved (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The drivers contain code licensed from third-parties, such that opening the source would require extensive contracts, negotiations, and more licensing. Probably most of these third-party software vendors won't agree to have their code opened for the same reasons that all closed-source companies keep their source closed.
2. Modern video cards (and other hardware too, probably) contain a surprising amount of their logic and "acceleration magic" in the driver. The card itself, though dedicated to a particular hardware task, is quite general and thus the code controlling the card contains many of the important 'tricks' to get good performance. (In fact I've been told that the difference between some cards and higher models is only in the driver.) In such cases, releasing the software code would be like releasing the hardware circuit diagram: it would reveal many of their trade secrets (some of which may be patent-protected, others not).
3. Even if it would be illegal, some people would modify and redistribute the code. Hobbyist hackers would alter the code and recompile. This might allow end-users to bypass restrictions on the card, enable other features (effectively upgrade the card by bypassing lockouts), and so on. This makes lock-in harder, and might reduce the frequency that people upgrade their hardware.
4. Their code, in all likelihood, violates a large number of competitor patents. As long as the violations are buried inside a binary, no one will notice. Opening the code would make it easy for a competitor to spot violations and sue. Probably all the companies violate each other's hardware and software patents, but they maintain an uneasy balance by all being secretive. If one company released too much information, the others would use it against them.
5. The company may worry about other liabilities that they become exposed to when users and competitors can peruse the codebase.
As I said, only the companies know for sure. But there are plenty of plausible reasons for why a hardware company wouldn't want to release driver source code. They are not great reasons (many of us would be more willing to buy the hardware if it had more documentation and/or open code), but they make business sense.
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Re:I'm relieved (Score:4, Insightful)
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Certified (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Certified (Score:5, Insightful)
If they didn't, its partly because they took the blame, as they should.
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How about Nouveau ? (Score:3, Funny)
I'll vouch for this (Score:5, Interesting)
No such problems for me (Score:5, Funny)
It's a cultural problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux users unite! (Score:5, Funny)
What makes me wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
nVidia had plenty of time for Vista launch (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation [microsoft.com]. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
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Re:What makes me wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
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Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
"It worked for me" - I don't really care.
Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care.
Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
The other 83.7% .... (Score:5, Funny)
These statistics were calculated using Excel.
Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:4, Informative)
You must pay for testing and signing your drivers, I think.
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Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems.
It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that in the race to produce the biggest, baddest, fastest, video cards for gamers, ATI/AMD and NVIDIA have often overlooked stability for performance. I don't know about you, but I'd gladly trade off a couple of FPS for a card that was rock solid stable.
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Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Minimal problems with 169 series (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, your uber OS may have stayed "on" in that it could reload all that crap without having to spend 20 seconds rebooting, but for all intents and purposes from a user perspective, your whole OS just freaking crashed.
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Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I will say that ATI's Linux drivers have come on leaps and bounds since AMD took the helm. They're still sucky, but they now only about twice as sucky as nVidia, as opposed to the binary equivalent of disemboweling yourself with a grapefruit spoon. The fact that, thanks to AMD publishing the specs for the silicon, a fully OSS, clean room, accelerated driver is now possible is also a colossal boon, and I suspect that within a few months the RadeonHD driver will be featureful and stable enough to be more than adequate for most people, once the distros start picking up on it.
Then, of course, it'd be nice if someone could write a way of accelerating video so that all us Linux users without eleventy billion jiggahurtz processors could play back 1080p H.264...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
YMMW!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is because it is not the driver who changes the resolution. It is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRandR [wikipedia.org] who does the magic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At least now there is a installable kernel module which eliminates the hassle now.
Now upgrading from one release to another is just a matter of ensuring that every
Re:Sounds a lot like finger pointing to me (Score:5, Informative)
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/eb1936c0-e19c-4a17-a1a8-39292e4929a41033.mspx?mfr=true [microsoft.com]
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
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