On Tuesday 28 December 2004 02:27, Valdis.Kletnieks(a)vt.edu wrote:
> If the interface between kernel and user-space doesn't
change then all
> they need to do is have one RPM for the shared objects and a set of RPMs
> that install .ko's in the correct places for each kernel. You would just
> have to make sure that every time you upgrade your kernel you install the
> matching drivers. If you didn't install the drivers then the symptom
> would be a lack of 3D graphics which would be easy to fix.
The reason why "they" did it the way "they" did, with one installer
for
everybody, was precisely because all the "you" out there would encounter
issues with "install the matching drivers" - what qualifies as "easy to
fix" for most readers of this list results in a call to the vendor for Joe
Sixpack.
So what do they do instead? Force a binary-only module to be loaded into a
kernel of a version other than the one it was created for? That's a recipe
for disaster! I hope that the users of the NVidia drivers don't have any
important data on their machines...
(Hell, just the last 48 hours I had a mysterious X.org issue caused
by two
conflicting NVidia libraries, a crufty one in one directory, a current
version in another, and the symptoms depended on what order ldconfig found
things in ld.so.conf....)
It seems that the NVidia drivers suck in many ways. What's the best option
for 3D graphics in Linux nowadays? Not NVidia I guess.
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