Which Linux Graphics Driver Bugs Do You Hate?

[bugmenot]

I hate fglrx, because there are lockups from time to time in different scenarios. compiz, videos, vt switching or with full screen games while pressing alt-tab.
I'm hoping for the free driver.

[beecher]

beecher, I believe both the radeon and radeonhd drivers have tear-free Xv support today. You'll need to pick up drm from either drm- next or the 6xx-7xx git branch of drm, but the X driver code has been merged to master on both radeon and radonhd.

I read that but I think it wouldn't be wise to use the free driver now without any kind of powermanagement implemented. Wouldn't my card run a little too hot after a while on my laptop ?

[lordmozilla]

fglrx catalyst 9.2 (or 9.1 same behaviour), with compiz + emerald - crashes to nothing during fullscreen video playback after 1 second.

Apart from that on my hd4850 everything is peachy and i dont' mind fglrx too much, nvidia drivers had their problems too.

[kernelOfTruth]

fglrx | AMD/ATI catalyst !

they:
- don't support proper video or opengl playback during composited desktop (flickering)
- don't support preemptive rcu
- don't properly support fully preemptive kernel
- don't support rt-kernel
- often lead to black screen which can't be restored
mostly when running composited desktop after some time
and several users logging in and out of their account (running gdm)
only MagicSysRQ Key works in those cases
- STILL hardlocks kernel when logging out of the composited desktop session (using gdm) OR when being forced to restart gdm/kdm several time OR remove the fglrx kernel-module and restarting gdm
- providing bad performance compared to an 7600 GT (I'm using an Radeon HD 4850 !)

I'm really looking forward to the xf86-video-radeonhd when it will be support powermanagement, 3D and other stuff properly my desktop mostly will be free

I don't get it why everybody is ranting about nvidia (I had problems with my nvidia card and that was the reason why I bought my first radeon card after a long period of time (4-5 years). Before that I had sworn not to buy any AMD/ATI card anymore because of their abysmal linux support which has improved somewhat but I'm still far from satisfied)
ATI/AMD's drivers have much improved but they're still MUCH worse than nvidia (unfortunately)

[mitrol]

radeon and radeonhd - X freeze with EXA, no reliable resume from suspend

fglrx - black screen on user switch on Ubuntu 8.10 and sometimes on logout with openSUSE (catalyst 8.11), garbled screen on logout from driver 8.12 till 9.2 with openSUSE 11.1 and no EXA support.

[kernelOfTruth]

I hate fglrx, because there are lockups from time to time in different scenarios. compiz, videos, vt switching or with full screen games while pressing alt-tab.
I'm hoping for the free driver.

exactly !


fglrx | AMD/ATI catalyst !

they:
- don't support proper video or opengl playback during composited desktop (flickering)
- don't support preemptive rcu
- don't properly support fully preemptive kernel
- don't support rt-kernel
- often lead to black screen which can't be restored
mostly when running composited desktop after some time
and several users logging in and out of their account (running gdm)
only MagicSysRQ Key works in those cases
- STILL hardlocks kernel when logging out of the composited desktop session (using gdm) OR when being forced to restart gdm/kdm several time OR remove the fglrx kernel-module and restarting gdm
- providing bad performance compared to an 7600 GT (I'm using an Radeon HD 4850 !)
- their support for new linux kernel versions is ridiculous !

I'm really looking forward to the xf86-video-radeonhd when it will be support powermanagement, 3D and other stuff properly my desktop mostly will be free

[wswartzendruber]

Well now that we have X Server 1.6, a vast majority of my complaints (two years now) have gone out the window. Now all I wish for is proper VSYNC and VT switching (without freezing).

[deanjo]

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.

Take a linux distro from the 2001 era and see how well it runs out of the box on your modern system. Slipstreaming and integration of XP patches and drivers can relieve the issues you have with windows XP. nLite makes the whole process painless. In contrast if you downloaded the Windows 7 Beta you would see that on modern hardware even things like tv cards, bluetooth, sli, fakeraids, etc are supported on a vast majority of hardware out of the box, what isn't is usually easily found with a windows update. Comparing a OS that was put together 7+ years ago to one that was released a few days ago isn't exactly a fair comparison when it comes to what it supports out of the box.

Let's be fair, if someone was to compare Windows 7 to Redhat 7.2 there would be a lot of screaming.

It's hard to believe i have supported opengl 3.0 on linux and only 2.1 on windows.

Not sure what video card you have but both ATI and Nvidia have ogl3 window drivers.

[RobotMarvin]

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.

You sure about that...? It doesn't look that way if you consider some postings over at nvnews.net where some of the devs state that they had a look at issue x or issue z but don't have the time to fix it just yet. Or similar things.

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

I really beg to differ. My 8600 GTS card died on me in January and I had to get a replacement fast because I need my computer for work. Since I already tried an AMD 4870 in early Q4/2008, I decided to go with NVidia again because the experience I made with the AMD one wasn't too good, to say the least. So after driving around in my city, I ended up with a Palit 9800 GTX+ which is actually overkill for me but at least silent and was the only thing I could get which wasn't a total vacuum cleaner soundwise.

To make a long story short: with the 8600 GTS, my system was rock solid, no freezes or anything like it, no matter what 180.xx release I used. Once I got the 9800 GTX+, I had total freezes with graphical corruption. Totally erradic. Working was impossible that way because you could get everything from zero to 10 freezes a day. Disabling the Composite Extension and similar things naturally didn't fix the issue. Only reverting back to 177.82 "fixed" it for me... well... more a workaround actually.

Head over to nvnews.net and have a look at that lengthy thread. You will soon realize that a lot of people are bitten by this bug and there are a total of <5 dev postings there if I remember correctly which are more or less useless to be honest. And this is still ongoing since Nov 08.

So... I'd say, and many from nvnews.net would agree, that depending on your GFX card, at least the 180.xx series is a total mess and nvidia is unable to fix it or keep their users in the loop about what's actually going on.

Best regards,
matthias.

PS. I don't use Ubuntu but Gentoo on x86_64 and also tried X 1.6.0 snapshots, different kernels and what else. The bug is _clearly_ with nvidia.

[december]

Any

I hate any sort of graphic card bugs, really.

I can understand all the latest multi-gpu stuff is still rather buggy, but there really shouldn't be any excuse for basic 2D and 3D functionality to be unstable and riddled with bugs. As I don't really play games, I put my money on any card that I assume will guarantee the most trouble-free graphical experience. If ATI and NVidia don't get their act together, I can only hope one of those open-source graphical cards will see the light of day, or a third manufacturer (Intel? S3?) to gobble up some of the ATI/NVidia market share by having superior drivers for products with reasonable enough performance.

I don't care for half-working products, be it due to hardware or software bugs. There just is no excuse for selling something that doesn't work as advertised.