Which Linux Graphics Driver Bugs Do You Hate?

This week we received a note from Matthias Dahl, a Phoronix reader, who wanted to remind us about current problems plaguing the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series. Using any of the newer NVIDIA Linux drivers can cause graphics corruption followed by the system locking up. These problems are certainly known by NVIDIA and are experienced by many users as can be seen from this NvNews Forum thread. Below is what Matthias had to share about the situation.

To sum it up: Most users of newer generation cards (anything starting from 8800 based one) are seeing total system freezes with prior graphical corruption which are total erratic. This has been an issue ever since November 08 and is limited to the 180.xx driver release which unfortunately is the only one maintained now by NVidia. Reverting back to 177.82 fixes the problem for everyone. Currently NVidia focues on implementing new features but seems to ignore serious bugs which are affecting a lot of people. That's not the way to go, especially if they keep their customers in the dark and don't report any status back to the forums.

This problem is quite common and we have experienced this problem with all NVIDIA 180.xx drivers (including the most recent 180.35 driver) on a variety of different hardware. Corruption on the screen becomes come after a while along with window titles not updating or becoming corrupted, etc. In fact, just while typing this news post a Pidgin window became unusable on NVIDIA hardware.

Many using the newer Linux drivers on NVIDIA hardware have likely noticed this problem. Though regardless of which driver or hardware you are using, what Linux graphics driver bugs are currently affecting you? Share with us your Linux driver frustrations in the Phoronix Forums.