Fedora Core 6 HUGE problem - Binary drivers.

[Gilboa Davara]

On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 14:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 May 2007 13:46:26 +0300
> > "V at ly" <valy.tgv at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> hello! i've one day of my life downloading your FC6 DVD image. i've burnt it
> >> and checked it for errors. it was ok so i "started" setup. you might wonder
> >> why the "" around started... well the graphical setup just wouldn't start.
> >> after the blue setup screen, at the part where it says "running
> >> anaconda....." when it tries to detect my video card it only detects the
> >> manufacturer which is nVidia but not the actual card which is a GeForce 6200
> > 
> > Nvidia support is fairly basic because they choose to keep all their bits
> > secret.
> 
> *AND* because the fedora distribution does nothing to assist their users 
> in installing the driver that Nvidia makes freely available.  The 
> party-line argument that third party drivers cause support problems kind 
> of falls on its face when the included driver doesn't work at all...
> 
>    Les Mikesell
>     lesmikesell at gmail.com
> 

Oh come-on! Not that argument again!
Ignoring for the second the GPL problem (so called party-line), which is
the basis on which... err... Linux is built:

Please solve the following problems:

Case 1: (Happens once every 6 months or so)
1. nVidia tends to release their driver on a 4 month - 1 month schedule.
(Major each 4 months, with a minor bug fix after a one month)
2. Fedora kernel people are pushing a new upstream kernel that is
incompatible with the current nVidia release - while nVidia is during
the their major-update-wait.
... Which in turn:
A. Fedora should not push a new kernel update because nVidia has yet to
support it.
B. Fedora should push a new kernel update, getting hammered by users
that have broken system on their hands.

Case 2:
1. Fedora is about to release new major release (Fx) which uses a kernel
which is completely incompatible with the current nVidia driver.
2. nVidia, due to Vista driver development problems, decides to spend
less resources on Linux driver development.
... Which in turn:
A. Fedora should use the old Fedora Fx-1 kernel just to maintain
compatibility with nVidia - until nVidia releases a new driver. (If and
when)
B. Fedora should release the new kernel with Fx, breaking support for
the nVidia driver. (Which is officially supported - following your
advice)

Both Case 0 and Case 1 happened before. (8K stacks, X.org 7.x, 2.5.x
kernels, a couple of 2.6.xx releases, Xen, etc)

While I use the nVidia driver on a daily basis on a number of
i386/x86_64 machines (and I have the utmost respect for nVidia's driver
development team for producing close-to-rock-solid-drivers *), Fedora
should not officially support, nor for that matter should they even care
about breaking my setup when it's time to push a new update. (Kernel,
X.org, etc)
It's my choice to use binary-only out-of-the-tree drivers and it's not
Fedora's problem if things break because of it.

- Gilboa