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Apple/NVidia Driver Bug — Question Deleted

Posted by kdawson on Sun Jan 14, 2007 07:50 PM
from the sup-with-that? dept.
Bug Businesses Graphics Software Apple
Joe Drago writes "I purchased a Mac Pro within the first week that they were available, and immediately upgraded to 3GB of RAM (knowing that OSX loves memory). 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. After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.' What's going on here? Is Apple trying to hide this bug, or is there something more serious going on between Apple and NVidia?"
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Apple/NVidia Driver Bug — Question Deleted 50 Comments More /

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  • the "problem" (Score:5, Funny)

    by macadamia_harold (947445) on Sunday January 14 2007, @07:52PM (#17607802) Homepage
    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. After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.'

    Macs "just work". Everyone knows that. Obviously the "problem" is your fault, and/or you're a troll.

  • Here's my take on it (Score:5, Funny)

    by TitusC3v5 (608284) on Sunday January 14 2007, @07:55PM (#17607822) Homepage
    [This comment has been deleted.]

  • To strongly worded? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bcmm (768152) on Sunday January 14 2007, @07:56PM (#17607832)
    The complaint is reasonable and mostly well put, but perhaps the speculation at then end annoyed them enough to make them remove it?

    It still comes across as a bit unreasonable to remove it, however. But it's Apple. They don't expect you to upgrade things on your own.

  • Intellectual property (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2007, @07:58PM (#17607854)
    Wow, I'm kind of surprised this popped up on slashdot (I figured it would get mentioned in a blog, at most, and forgotten about). I'm one of the admins on that forum, and can confirm that yes, we've been asked to nuke anything regarding nVidia, at least in certain contexts. One recent addition to our arrangement with them (to provide kernel drivers) involves some very restrictive IP deals that upper management has interpreted to mean we shouldn't even acknowledge certain kinds of bugs in a very specific area. It's my understanding that there are some serious showstopper bugs inherent to nvidia's platform independent core code that they really do not want releasing. Most of us think this is utter BS (and management being paranoid), fwiw.

    And yes, there are enough forum admins that I'm not too scared about 'leaking' like this. Note that I'm keeping the exact details secret :p

    • Re:Intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)

      by erroneus (253617) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:46PM (#17608292) Homepage
      This sounds rather plausible... at least we all *want* to believe it.

      But frankly, with all the other nonsense that goes on surrounding Apple, their products and all that, it just fits. I find that Apple is so incredibly arrogant about the way they refuse to fix problems (for example, the 128GB limit bug for some older G4 machines and before) I see Apple eventually going the way that Sony will be going -- relying on the ignorance of uninformed people who buy their brand because of the recognition and prior reputation.

      EVENTUALLY, enough sales people at Best Buy and the like will tell people what's wrong with Sony and Apple and the word will get out.

    • Re:Intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)

      by this great guy (922511) on Sunday January 14 2007, @10:42PM (#17609218)

      In a recent Slashdot article [slashdot.org] about an effort to write an open source driver for Nvidia cards, people such as mgemmons were asking "What is wrong with the proprietary driver?" [slashdot.org] Well, what a perfect example you have there: Nvidia is actively trying to hide serious bugs/limitations present in their drivers ! WTF ! This sort of vendor behavior is precisely one of the reasons why some of us would like open source drivers.

      • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WindBourne (631190) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:33PM (#17608162) Journal
        There are lots of things that happen on /. that ppl can not offer direct evidence of it. If you like, assume that all of them are wrong. But I have seen things on here from AC's that I knew to be correct (by having worked at 2 of the places that had been talked about), but were said to be trolls or conspiracy theories. You simply have to ask wether you will accept the possibility. If so, then ask is it possible. Then decide what you want to do with it.

        As to the current posting, yeah, it is possible. Apple is not high and mighty. They have been shown to be "evil" at times. Of course, it is not that surprising. Lots of companies do things like this.

  • Driver support (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:00PM (#17607872)
    Apple and nVidia have both said, in public, many times, that in the specific case of Apple NV cards, the drivers are handled by Apple.

  • I'd love to see the commercial (Score:5, Funny)

    by d474 (695126) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:01PM (#17607884)
    Apple Guy: Hi, I'm an Apple.
    PC Guy: Hi, I'm a PC.
    Apple Guy: *itching crotch*
    PC Guy: Got a problem there?
    Apple Guy: No, I'm fine. (*cockroaches fall to floor from pant leg*)
    PC Guy: Having a little problem with that "Nvidia card"? (chuckles)
    Apple Guy: *walks off set*
    PC Guy: Don't mind him, he's just trying to support more than 2GB of RAM...

  • Apple's Bugs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Liquid-Gecka (319494) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:03PM (#17607896)
    This is what I would expect. When I bugged apple about their broken NFS support on servers they told us that engineers would get back to us. They never did. So I started asking on forums and mailing lists to see if I could get an answer and as soon as I brought it up the thread would get killed or the post would be deleted. Then when we had issues with MPICH it as the same dang thing. Eventually they admitted that MPICH2 works much nicer on Mac OS than MPICH 1 due to some network implementations stuff. Every time I brought it up on the forums though the thread would get killed. (For the curious, the problem that we where having was that an Apple server running NFS would always seem to forget about the last file in a directory when it cached the directory contents. so running "mkdir a; cd a; touch 1 2 3 4 5 6 ; cd .. ; rm -rf a" would fail one out of four times when being done over NFS. If you waited a half an hour then ran rm -rf a it would work great. This issue didn't happen when Mac OS systems mounted Linux NFS shares, but happened every time a Linux or Mac OS system mounted a NFS share off of a Mac OS based system. This was still happening to all of our PPC based systems as of last summer when we finally switched them over to PPC Linux, which made the problem go away) I guess what I am saying is that it is not surprising. Apple has always nuked threads that made them look bad so why not this one?

  • Redundant bug: fix to be backdated (Score:5, Funny)

    by vandan (151516) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:22PM (#17608070) Homepage
    The post was clearly redundant, as the bug will be fixed in the future, and the release date back-dated :)

  • NVidia bug OR memory upgrade issue? (Score:5, Informative)

    by martyb (196687) on Sunday January 14 2007, @10:04PM (#17608940)

    (Couldn't access the article's screen capture - site's bandwidth exceeded.)

    I did some googling around, and it appears that Mac Pro systems have been known to Kernel Panic in a number of cases after a memory upgrade. Have you considered that you might have TWO (intermittent) problems?

    According to this [xlr8yourmac.com]http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/Mac_Pro/mac_pro _ram.html [xlr8yourmac.com] upgrade memory should have larger heatsinks than standard heatsinked FB-Dimms. It has links to: memory test utilities, ECC correction reports, and most notably:

    FYI - Page 2 [anandtech.com] of PC site Anandtech's Mac Pro upgrades article has comments on using standard heatsink FB-Dimms (which some readers previously reported worked ok so far at least, although others have noted ECC error corrections)

    "We had no problems running all of our benchmarks with the standard (flat heatsink) Crucial FB-DIMMs; however, if we ran a memory stress test for even just a short period of time the modules quickly reported correctable ECC errors. (Apple system profiler memory status section) Apple's original modules did not generate any ECC errors, so it looks like the additional cooling is necessary under the most extreme situations." (emphasis added)

    Questions:

    1. What brand of memory did you upgrade with? Apple? Crucial? Kingston? Other?
    2. Did your memory have the standard-sized or larger-sized heat sinks?
    3. What memory stress tests have you run?
    4. Were any ECC errors reported?
    5. What was the distribution of memory in your system? (which boards of what size and manufacture in which risers?)
    6. If you pull the original memory and use just the upgrade memory, does the problem still exist?

    Hope this helps!

    • Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Karzz1 (306015) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:14PM (#17608004) Homepage
      The video card was standard in his machine. In other words... it was supplied by Apple. The drivers he is using are from Apple. Nvidia doesn't even offer Mac drivers on their site. [nvidia.com]

        • Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2007, @09:32PM (#17608666)
          Reality check:

          When the stock car stereo in your new Ford emits magic smoke one week after you drive the car off the dealer's lot, do you contact your the Ford dealer network or Delphi?

          Of course you know the answer. Not suprisingly, if you buy a Dell it IS Dell's fault. Dell claims to sell computers, not assembly services for a pile of Intel, Nvidia, and Seagate parts. Dell is even obligated to support the majority of the Microsoft software that it "merely" installs on those computers under the terms of the various licenses and supply agreements that it has negotiated. And we're not even discussing Dell, we're discussing APPLE. The mere suggestion that the end user should have to resolve a bug by contacting an OEM parts supplier, however famous, is laughable.

    • Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Informative)

      by duffbeer703 (177751) * on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:20PM (#17608052)
      NVidia will only directly support customers who purchase add-on cards. If you buy an Apple, Dell, HP, etc with an NVidia card, you need to work with the OEM to get a supported driver.

    • Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Funny)

      by petecarlson (457202) on Sunday January 14 2007, @09:45PM (#17608782) Homepage Journal
      In fact, the bug was written by an out-sourced company in Taiwan. Did you try contacting them? Obviously Nvidia isn't the right company to contact... No wait, this just in. The bit of code was actually written by Michael Huang, a temp who works for a contracting firm. Please send him a letter describing your problem.

      Next week on Slashdot.

      I sent Michael Huang a detailed letter describing my problem and he shredded it without responding. Is this any way to treat the customers of your clients customers customer?

    • Re:A screen grab? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SuperBanana (662181) on Sunday January 14 2007, @08:49PM (#17608330)

      How often do people take screen grabs of their posts to a forum? Was their expectation of it being removed?

      Apple routinely deletes posts discussing known defects; it's very well known among Apple-using techies. Apple has done it in almost every case where there have been hardware defects of any kind. A classic example would be the iBook motherboard failures. I would imagine they do it to a)keep other owners from finding out and demanding fixes as well, b)keeping the press from finding out, and c)to defend themselves in any lawsuits which can claim "well, people reported it on your forums, so you must have known about it!" So...yes.

      Web forums and mailing lists fuck with a classic PR/customer service move: deny all knowledge. I had a problem with speakers in my car, which in some cases had caused smoke or fire in this particular model. We called the car company, and each member of the forum, over a period of several weeks, was told "we have no knowledge of any other reports of problems with this model." They lied straight through their teeth. We later found out that over ten years before, a vehicle had completely burned to the ground because of the same defect, and company reps came out, looked at the car, purchased it back off the owner no questions asked, etc. They knew about the defect for over a decade and a half, and only after lots of bitching to NHSTA, did we get them to do anything about it. Oh, and dealing with NHSTA was another barrel of monkeys. Call their 800 number, and you get an operator who cannot do a single thing except ask for your address and send you the forms to report a problem. Once you do, they completely prevent you from speaking to the investigator at NHSTA to communicate further details et al.

              • Re:Sorry. Not Correct (Score:5, Funny)

                by Pink Tinkletini (978889) on Monday January 15 2007, @02:48AM (#17610680) Homepage
                The only accounting firms where Macs would fit in culturally are the ones practicing creative, avant-garde methods of accounting, and after the Andersen implosion there are precious few of those left around. My advice to you is to stay true to yourself: stay beige. Don't pretend you're anything else.

      • Re:A screen grab? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tomhudson (43916) <hudson@nOspAM.videotron.ca> on Sunday January 14 2007, @09:07PM (#17608480) Homepage Journal

        The screen grab wasn't of his original question, but of his question after they deleted all but the subject line.

        It was only after the question was deleted that he began questioning Apple's motives.

        My take on it is that nobody would buy a 3-gig box if they can't properly use the extra gig of ram, and this could hurt sales, as well as give people justification for post-xmas returns (and then buying the 2-gig machine at a post-xmas price).

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