Kernel 2054 breaks nvidia.ko loading

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 3/16/06, Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> My point is - for me it is definitely *not* a feature that FC5 will be
> unusable out of the box. Arjan's assurance that it's "just a matter of
> time before it is broken again" sounds very disturbing to me.

It is disturbing.. and its the reality for any module which exists
outside the mainline kernel. Doubly more disturbing and doubly more
real for binary only modules which may exist.  In this case.. can't
this be fixed with a hotfix patch to the livna rpms for the nvidia
driver so that anyone using the nvidia rpms from livna can have
working nvidia "out-of-the-box?" until the next kernel update?  Yes
yes, shame on the fedora developers for introducing a bug which
affects a module they don't directly support nor test for.. shame
shame shame. Now how about we get to work making the hot fix in the
livna rpms to correct for the mistake.

> Fedora
> should be aiming to provide the opposite assurance - "things will work
> most of the time".

Aim for the stars and you land on the moon.  testing for the nvidia
module functionality  has consistently been out-of-scope for the Core
developers and I think the arguments on both sides of this issue have
been well established now. Instead of getting into this..again.. can
you please just reference a similar thread from fc1 or fc2 to save
everyone the time.

> I fail to see why it's a good thing when 3D drivers
> have been broken for a large percent of the Linux user base.

Sane people don't claim this is a good thing... but no one has ever
claimed that keeping the nvidia driver working or delibrately breaking
the nvidia driver was a release goal for any Fedora release.. nor the
upstream kernel for that matter.  Sometimes bad things happen
unintentially based on perfectly reasonable decision making. Its a
matter or priorties and its been made abundantly clear through the
history of fedora core development, that a working nvidia driver is
not a priority on the finite core developer manpower, regardless of
the popularity of the driver.

Now if you can help fix this by adjusting the livna rpm packages to
introduce the missing function as been suggested as a quick fix,
please do so. At this point it simply doesn't matter whose fault it
is... the release isn't going to be respun to fix this. So we can
either hold our breath in protest, or we can get a move on providing a
fix in the relevant rpm packages which users will be consuming.

-jef"makes his dexterity check and casts 'generic rage' adding +2
damage to all flame attacks"spaleta