NVIDIA Recalls Linux Drivers Over Fan Speed Bug

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers.

NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has made an announcement that this driver fan speed bug may be present in the 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 driver releases so users should cease using those drivers and revert to the older 190.53 version. NVIDIA is in the process of pulling these drivers from their web-site.

Canonical has already issued a warning to those using the NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu 10.04 to disable the driver and switch over to the open-source Nouveau driver until this serious bug has been resolved.