Which Linux Graphics Driver Bugs Do You Hate?

[sabriah]

Sound bugs

What bugs me the most are not the graphics drivers per se, but the audio drivers.

I have to, and far too often, kill X in order to restore the sound. And, logging out and logging in as another user often produce a mute computer.

I have still not understood the pattern but I think the graphics drivers are interlinked to tis issue, in some way. Maybe someone knows better.

I run Debain Sid/Experimental with KDE4 and the latest nvidia drivers on a 8800GT.

[Chewi]

I don't seem to have as many problems with fglrx as most people. The video tearing is annoying but I can live with it until the open driver supports 3D. The one problem that really bugs me is that logging out or trying to restart X in any way sends the card into a spasm. The display freezes, the graphics fan starts going full pelt and the only thing I can do is hit the power button, which at least shuts down the machine cleanly. If it was a hard lockup then the file corruption probably would have made me chuck my card by now.

[djtm]

Stuttering

My intel card loves to stutter:
E.g. I play a video or scroll down a web page and nothing moves for half a second or so, then more quickly for .1 second or so. It can get extremely annoying... I checked it out in latencytop and found nothing there. I'm using the most up to date drivers.

The current driver in Ubuntu 8.10 also often doesn't recover some suspend correctly. I have to switch back and forth between X and console to get a working screen. But that's not as bad.

[psycho_driver]

All's peachy with my 9800gt and the 5900fx before that. Also the HTPC with the 7050 chugs right along.

[Dragoran]

Currently NVidia focues on implementing new features but seems to ignore serious bugs which are affecting a lot of people.

The people writing the new features (VDPAU is meant here) aren't the same who are responsible for the X11 or kernel parts where the bugs are. So adding this new features does not take man power away from the other parts.

In fact, just while typing this news post a Pidgin window became unusable on NVIDIA hardware.

I suppose you where using compiz, this is not a bug in the nvidia driver but a race condition in the way the XDamage extension work.

The reason why it does not happen with older drivers was that not all pixmaps where stored in video memory and therefore it was unlikely to trigger. Now pixmaps are stored in video memory by default which improves performance a lot but causes this.

This corruption does not happen if you use strict bindings (which is used in all open source drivers and fglrx) but on G80+ hardware it is slow due to a bug, that's why people/some distro scripts enable loose-binding for nvidia hardware.

Plagman (an nvidia dev) investigated the issue and told me that it should be fixed in the next driver series. (18x ; where x > 0 )
It cannot be backported to 180.xx because it was a rather huge change.

There might be problems and bugs in the nvidia drivers, but they aren't that bad as this article tries to show it.

In fact the 180.xx drivers work very well for me (compiz works fine with good performance, 2d and 2d is fast, video playback works fine, suspend/resume works fine.)

[unix_epoch]

The issue that annoys me the most is that when there is more than one video card present (such as in an SLI system) I have to enter PCI IDs in the xorg.conf manually. This may have been fixed, but why can't X just detect which video card was enabled by the BIOS and use it?

[Hephasteus]

The issue that annoys me the most is that when there is more than one video card present (such as in an SLI system) I have to enter PCI IDs in the xorg.conf manually. This may have been fixed, but why can't X just detect which video card was enabled by the BIOS and use it?

That's what everyone seems to be working on. Not just for making sytems easier to set up or install with less things to do but also for virtualization. It just seems that it's a long boring process of going through all the bios's and cataloging what and how they do everything.

I just reset up windows XP and fedora 10 and hands down fedora 10 beat windows to a pulp. Configuring repositories, installing few drivers, getting flash working versus hours of installing tons of drivers and driver packages under windows. I couldn't believe how things have turned so ugly for microsoft on hardware support. Granted the end result under windows is bit more polished but at this rate in 2 years nobod will want to set up windows because it will be considered HARD versus linux.

Nouveou is giving Nvidia a kick in the pants but everyone seems to be waking up to fact that the number of linux systems keeps growing rapidly. Fedora broke 12million, ubuntu has god knows how many, and if they are going to use video cards as processors it's all get done for servers and workstations. Everyone is climbing all over each other to get it done. It's hard to believe i have supported opengl 3.0 on linux and only 2.1 on windows.

[NeoBrain]

- Creating a second instance of the X server on another display hardlocks the system
- Resuming after S2RAM results in corruption and a freezing X server (mouse movable but hardlocks if you try to kill X)

Apart from that, I have not been able to use Compiz's "Blur windows" effect since 9 months or so.

[.CME.]

let's see
geforce4 420 go: 96.43.10, the nvidia drivers only detects a 969x768 display and there is a black bar in the right (this is also in the windows driver since detonator 28.xx!!) with a custom EDID it works ok, but i can not use anymore a second display (ist just says that it doesn't detect any second monitor in the xorg.0.log)

geforce 7800GTX: well, overall it works good, but xvideo is borked. when i use my TV at 50hz and play some 50hz material, X gets very slow and then there is a bad judder in the video (mplayer, with OpenGL there is no problem, and when playing 25fps videos, it doesn't display everytime every picture twice, but sometimes the first picture 1 time, the second 3 times (xvideo AND OpenGL) which ends also in a bad judder

ati rage 128 xpert 128: r128:
short: a MESS
long: xvideo on interlaced modelines is broken
OpenGL is slow, some application (blender, google earth) has graphic errors and after 1 minute the complete system freezes (no ping response, no sysrq etc.)
on some OpenGL apps it just crashs with "r128 timed out" and when using OpenGL the mouse cursor gets a random color and when i move a windows fast while running an OpenGL app, X freezes for 20-60sec etc.
ah, and DMA for xvideo is also broken and since debian lenny Xorg is slow as hell on this machine :\

[Na-Fiann]

I guess that tearing in xv is one that bugs me a lot, since I watch all my video on my pc.. especially how it even crashes my desktop when compiz is running.
Also, not really a bug, but in ut2004 I can get 90 fps easily on my monitor's native resolution in windows. On linux however, it's having trouble getting to 25 fps just rendering the wall, and this is on an ati 4830 which is capable of much better!
Other than that, things work fine here