__/ [ Sandman ] on Monday 15 January 2007 10:58 \__
> In article <1278663.qzH5zGyIZt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Apple/NVidia Driver Bug -- Question Deleted
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | When playing 3D games (World of Warcraft mainly), the game would
>> | Kernel Panic the machine if I had played it for a few hours, or if
>> | I swapped in and out of the game a few times, etc. I eventually
>> | found out (from an official Blizzard poster) that NVidia has a bug
>> | in their drivers that kernel panics a Mac Pro if any memory past the
>> | 2GB boundary is addressed in the driver.
>> `----
>>
>> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/14/211242&from=rss
>>
>> In the past, NVidia even had a critical vulnerability in their binary
>> drivers, which exposed the kernel to attacks.
>
> And had it not been a binary driver, this gamer would just rewrite the
> source and recompile the driver and then continue his game?
No, the criticism one has in these circumstances (this relates to the NSA's
'gift' to Vista) is that intent is unknown and a small room of developers
can keep secrets. When you have pairs of eyes in multiple companies and
cities (think Linux kernel, for instance), then the secret is harder to keep
and the knowledge is more diverse, which leads to identification of bugs and
avoidance of interests of a single company being served (exclusively).
Let me illustrate this. This morning, for example, on the WordPress hackers
mailing list, one guy spotted a glitch in a new patch. Many of us receive a
list of patches by E-mail and sometimes we dicuss them, having glanced at
the diff (there's wp-hackers and wp-testers, among other lists). Okay, I'm
drifing off topic here, but the point to make is that NVidia keeps its
secret sauce (or source) in house and doesn't enable an army of volunteers
to help, even is only by proposal. Many of these volunteers are concerned
users who put the programs on their mission-critical servers. It's only
natural to be curious, skeptic, concerned, and involved. Transparency gives
peace of mind, _as well as_ better quality. Want no contributions? Then
fine. Ignore the patches and bug reports. Lose cusotmers at will..
--
~~ Best regards
Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: Sharks are immune to cancer
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
11:20am up 88 days 21:34, 7 users, load average: 0.00, 0.06, 0.15
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
|
|
