Ubuntu Policy on binary driver bugs

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Hello,

After reading yet another series of threads regarding the NVIDIA binary
drivers I would like to ask: "What the Ubuntu position is towards binary
driver bugs?". Does Ubuntu take a similar stance to Red Hat whereupon
the moment you taint your kernel your bug will be closed and you will be
directed towards NVIDIA for help
( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=73733 /
http://fedorasolved.org/video-solutions/3rd-pty-video ) or is Ubuntu
going invite NVIDIA engineers to review NVIDIA related bugs within
Launchpad the way Novell/SUSE currently does (e.g.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=147009 - Andy Ritger works
for NVIDIA)? Perhaps Ubuntu is going to encourage a halfway house where
people are requested to post over in the bugs.freedesktop.org closed
NVIDIA component?

I only ask out of curiosity. I am a Geforce 1 owner who was mostly
( http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0108.0/1127.html )
unconcerned all the way up until NVIDIA marked my card legacy in their
"unified" drivers. Things haven't been quite as sweet since and I have
seen the confusion the "new-legacy" 96xx drivers have caused on another
distribution in my workplace. However I will hastily add that I am not
ungrateful for the support NVIDIA gives to legacy hardware - I gather
sometimes binary driver vendors simply stop supporting old hardware
entirely in their drivers...

NVIDIA seem to fix bugs in their drivers while your card is "non-legacy"
but they will not necessarily fix every bug and it's not clear whether a
reported bug will ever be fixed once your card becomes legacy. In my
case the rate of new legacy releases has slowed considerably (with
regard to kernel releases) and it is unclear whether features which were
unstable in the last driver (like RenderAccel and Composite) will be
fixed. It's also not clear whether the legacy drivers were affected by
the same Render exploit in the new drivers a while back. I suspect it's
too much to ask for support of new Xorg features like texture_to_pixmap
but I kinda hope NVIDIA will add support for it in their 71xx series. At
any rate this only affects Ubuntu if these binary only bugs are going to
be seen by NVIDIA (since to paraphrase someone else "nobody else can
help").

-- 
Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/