Apple/NVidia Driver Bug — Question Deleted 703
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?"
Apple Policy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple Policy (Score:5, Insightful)
A new Apple icon needs to be added to Slashdot, showing a man gagged by an apple.
To strongly worded? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
STFU and take it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple Policy (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, then they should post a reply to that effect -- not delete the whole thread!
A more obvious conclusion... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not NVIDIA's problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wrong place? (Score:2, Insightful)
So if you found out it's an Nvidia driver bug... why would you post in the Apple forums for an answer?
Because he purchased the machine from Apple. They are his one point support contact.
Do fanboys dislike Mac Owners approached Apple for support?
Re:Wrong place? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How did you get the screenshot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Forum rules? (Score:3, Insightful)
He may have expressed irritation, but he still asked a perfectly valid question. He's entitled to know if Apple agrees that there is a driver bug or thinks that something else is going on, and if it is a driver bug, are they working on it and when can the fix be expected.
Oh fer cryin'... (Score:4, Insightful)
Either that, or the tinfoil hat's beginning to cut off circulation.
Possible reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intellectual property (Score:1, Insightful)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
impolite and immature (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, if you really wanted to try to help: you could sign up for a developer account (connect.apple.com, there are free accounts if you don't want to pay for the benefits of being the full developer access), and report the bug at bugs.apple.com. In that venue, you will be asked for clarification if your bug is not considered an outright duplicate or non-issue. And if it's an outright duplicate or a non-issue, they'll notify you as such. In the case of a duplicate, they'll direct you to the original so you can keep tabs.
In the meantime, I recommend you remove your extra 1 GB of memory, keep working, and adjust your attitude. 2 GB is still a heck of a lot of RAM and I bet it will do quite well. Your hours-long sessions of Warcraft and buying memory on hearsay don't suggest to me that you're putting that extra memory to good use with professional apps anyway.
Apple isn't out to get you.
Maybe your post just sucks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't you try Apple's bug reporting site instead of the Discussion forums? You know, the place where you actually report bugs?
Re:I really wanted to buy a MacBook Pro but... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Apple has the reputation for ease of use and quality marketing, both of which rely upon the hardware working. Unfortunately, the hardware is not providing the foundation it needs to provide.
Re:Intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Some suggestions (Score:4, Insightful)
You're suggesting that he purchase a new card on his own dime to correct the problem?
2 Take out one stick of memory. 3GB is kind of excessive IMO for OS X unless you REALLY need that much memory. I used to run WoW, iTunes, Firefox, Ventrilo, and other apps just fine (when I played WoW) and never had any memory issues with 2 GB. I think the Mac Pro benefits from interleaving as well (don't quote me on that, I don't have one) and requires a specific memory configuration.
There are plenty of reasons a Mac Pro owner would need over 2 gigs. Real time rendering in Final Cut or Motion, for example. Or large Photoshop files (particularly with the Rosetta crutch.) He uses WOW as an example but I doubt he bought a $3000 workstation to run a game that will play on an iMac. At least I hope he didn't.
3 Play WoW under windows with bootcamp. It was always a little faster for me under XP than OS X, but my subscription ran out a little while ago.
Obviously unacceptable. Booting Windows is not a solution. For one, you'll be going online, which means you will need to become a Windows security expert quickly-- and you will have to purchase a retail copy of XP, again on your own dime, to solve a problem Apple should fix.
This is Apple's problem. If it is a known issue they should fix it, or issue a recall to replace the cards. If the machine is under warranty he needs to raise a continual stink to get the problem fixed (one thing I do know about Apple support, if you draw one "genius" who won't help you you have to keep trying until you find one who will.)
Easy Answers (Score:4, Insightful)
Dumb bug on someone's part, but you're looking for a conspiracy where there is likely none.
Apple/nVidia driver bug -- what will happen? (Score:2, Insightful)
Clearly you are a well-informed, technically savvy person. It seems obvious that the question you posted to Apple's support site posed a major threat the the stability of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, so Apple simply removed the immediate threat to their image. You might want to be careful, lest they decide to remove the source of the threat...you haven't seen any unfamiliar non-descript vehicles parked outside your home recently, have you?
"iPod: you can get better, but you can't pay more." is a favorite saying of mine. It has applied to most oh-so-trendy Apple products since the late 80s. As someone who has supported Macs as part of my job in the past, beginning right about the time the Web did, I learned to not bother with official Apple forums and instead turn to the Mac user community sites.
Apple wants to maintain the carefully crafted illusion that Macs are trouble-free, never get infected by malware, and are easy to use even for computer illiterates. Only the last item has an element of truth to it. Macs are reasonably easy to use, for computer illiteres who don't want to actually do much with their computer. Businesspeople who continued to use Macs for various kinds of publishing work when Wintel was clearly the way to go for most purposes quickly discovered that Macs are at least as trouble-prone as PCs and since Apple is often slow to fix bugs and the Mac userbase has always been tiny compared to that of Wintel systems, there aren't as many other places to turn to for help, serious Mac problems often go unresolved for much longer than similar ones do on common Wintel platforms.
The Mac user community has long been fairly close knit and tries to be helpful, in my experience. It tends to lack the sheer numbers of folks with excellent technical skills that the Wintel user community has (due to sheer size) and the Linux crowd enjoys (because Linux users tend(ed) to be geeks by nature, at least until recently as more "user friendly" versions of Linux have appeared.
My bet is that Apple will feel the heat now that you've exposed the way they disappeared your technical question from their support forum and will probably claim that you failed to follow procedure or that someone removed it accidentally. I'd be somewhat amazed if you get a timely, useful reply to your query from Apple. If you do, please post it as a follow-up. Actually, any further responses you get from Apple would be interesting.
I'm more curious as to what nVidia will do now that this issue has been made very public. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get Ubuntu 6.10 to recognize the nVidia GeForce 7600 GS I installed along with a Dell 2407 WFP on my main machine. Windows XPx64Pro quickly recognized the new hardware and installed the proper drivers for it. Edgy Eft will only boot into CLI mode, complaining that it can't start the X server won't start, probably due to it not being set up correctly. If Linux vendors can come up with an effective Plug&Pray system like Microsoft has (finally, after several years of very gradual improvement), they'll be winning over a lot of people who might otherwise be suck(er)ed into the quagmire known as Vista.
It will be interesting to see which of us obtains a solution first.
Re:I really wanted to buy a MacBook Pro but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I should only have to report a problem to Apple. I should not need to report a problem to some random third-party "expeditor".
OS-X is tightly bonded to Apple hardware. Apple should do all within its powers to assure the hardware is nothing less than excellent.
Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:STFU and take it (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, because everybody has the skills required to fix kernel bugs.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrong place? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't do it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, this is an easy test. Just submit the same bug by 1000 or more different ppl on this list. Once that happens AND it comes out that it did not make the list, then Apple will either have to admit it and deal with it or simply allow bad PR. In light of how they have treated some of the support issues recently, I am guessing that they do not want to allow this to escalate into another support issue.
Use "Use"net (Score:3, Insightful)
First and foremost messages can be easily lost forever due to software or hardware failures, they can be censored by individuals who want them gone (Nazi Moderation). They also tend to not exist after a finite amount of time due to companies closing up shop or local retention limits. With usenet messages are propogated throughout the planet to thousands of separate stores.
Second using a browser even with all the modern trinkets and features still stinks compared to a real editor/news client.
Third to get answers that people take the time to post publically as a service to others tend to expose you to mounds and mounds of crap due to the proliferation of sites that exist to make money from google adwords.
Fourth categorization and search is much easier with a common protocol vs ad hoc web applications.
Fith access performance and just plain getting crap done factor was generally much higher in the good ole days before PHPBB and similiar technologies.
I know the above is one sided and there are lots of advantages to local systems.
Anyway I remember posting a message to one of the most popular soft phone forums a while back basically saying how stupid they were for allowing hyperlinking to SIP uris that just dial phone numbers without any kind of user say or any way to disable it short of registry hacks. A rediculous, stupid and obvious security problem. My post disappeared 20 minutes later but eventually after many months and lots of counseling I got over it and still use their software :) I figured at least they were smart enough to realize they were being stupid.
Re:Apple Policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:STFU and take it - Why is parent mod Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you give up something which you do not have? Apple users never had the freedom to modify, study and distribute NVidia's copyright code in the first place. Owning an Apple computer does not stop you using, modifying, studying and distributing software which you are entitled to use, modify, study and distribute. The only thing stopping Apple users from writing their own drivers is the fact that they already have access to one which offers substantially more functionality than the FOSS alternatives.
What they actually chose was a machine on which you have fully-featured accelerated 3D graphics with broad software support - it seems they value the freedom to play WoW and have whizzy 3D desktop effects more highly than the freedoms the FOSS alternatives offer.
Re:NVidia bug OR memory upgrade issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Exactly! (Score:3, Insightful)
That is just the point. If you don't know the exact problem it is impossible to find info on it. The parallels problem I had to dig through the Parallels forum to find a discussion of it and it wasn't the OS. It flat didn't work on the Mac pro and they knew it and weren't talking. Last time I checked, Parallels was finally offering a beta version for it months after I bought the machine.
all the places that would have the info are heavily censored. Adobe is doing the same thing. Try finding anything about it on the adobe site. No...this wasn't lack of research on my part. This was plain old deception. Can't lay that on the buyer. I'll concede they aren't alone in the practice. In fact thgis seems to be SOP for the entire industry, which is a pretty sad statement.
Re:Intellectual property (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Here's my take on it (Score:4, Insightful)
is there really any reason to archive it for posterity?
Re:Apple Policy (Score:2, Insightful)
What, exactly, is "new" about this? I assume you've never been in any sort of "high-level" retail position before. The first rule of customer service, which is drilled into every retail managers head from day one, is "For every customer that complains to you to get a problem fixed, there's 10 others that merely told everyone else they know to stop buying from you." Complaining about Apple's crappy customer service on Apple's apparently buggy hardware/software products to Apple's target audience is one of the most effective actions you can take.
Re:STFU and take it - Why is parent mod Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:1, Insightful)
What else do you want? iTunes is the medium through which they provide all the entertainment that people want, which means that all of it is under DRM. Looking at it this way, everything Apple has done regarding popular multimedia entertainment has been through DRM. And even worse, many of the capibilities are only available via Apple hardware and software. Yes, you can use iTunes on a PC or Laptop but that's as far as it goes. In my book this makes Apple more restrictive, not less. But it makes sense, hardware is one place where Apple makes money. I don't fault them for defending their business, but I won't pretend they are somehow more user friendly.
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some suggestions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Intellectual property (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure that some Apple customers would feel reassured to have proof of someone inside who's watching out for their (customer) interests and keeping them (customers) informed. However, if you're concern is about your job, don't get too cocky about your ability to scrub details.
Unfortunately, the task of scrubbing became very difficult when you posted the previous message. If I were a hypothetical security investigator tracking down a hypothetical leak, I would (a) look at the content of the leaked document and (b) look at when/who/how that content was accessed. In this case, that content is on "the admin-view forum page" (individual web page accesses are probably logged for statistical and debugging purposes), and I know that you accessed around 3-72 hours after 2007-01-14 20:38 EST. That'll probably narrow it down to 1-10 people. Add in other factors (e.g. previous patterns of dissent), and your anonymity might not last long.
I don't know anything about Apple's culture or internal security or about your role in Apple. Maybe leaking such info would be viewed as good PR move; maybe it's a fireable offense. Only you can judge. I'm just saying... I'd hate for you to do something you regret because you underestimated security techniques.
Re:Here's my take on it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple Policy (Score:3, Insightful)
As an Apple customer, I did!
Look, Apple can do what it wants. But if it wants business from people like me, it'll do what I want. And what I want is for it not to ignore its customers' problems, especially when they're caused by flaws in the product! Instead, I want it at least to acknowledge those flaws, even if there isn't anything that can be done about it. If nothing else, it'd be nice to know I'm not hallucinating if I experience them.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Also you'll have to excuse me if I don't trust you because of a random claim you make on the net. If I had a nickel for the number of people on the net claiming to have insider information on something and being full of it... Regardless the point is that telling the person it's not Apple's problem is wrong. It's similar to buying a Dell computer and the harddrive breaks. You don't call Maxtor or WD or whoever made it, you call Dell. They are supporting the whole package.
That is just wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Your analogy is just wrong. The tires are not part of the mechanics of the car. They can be replaced and have no influence on the mechanics that make the car a car. A problem with a third party mouse would be a fitting analogy to bad tires.
A better analogy would be a problem with an on-board computer in the car. And sure, the person could go to the manufacturer of the on-board computer, but why should they? Ford (my apologies to Ford... but continuing from your analogy) is the vendor of the package that is the car. We don't know what they might have had done to customize it to meet the needs of the specific vehicle design. And maybe it wasn't the on-board computers fault at all. Maybe it was something in the way it was connected or in the communication interface from the rest of the system. As a customer it is not reasonable to be expected to find the answers, so you go to the manufacturer of the car to get them to fix the faulty device. They can deal with the chip manufacturer because you paid the car company for a properly functioning product. The same is true when you purchase anything, including a computer. Just because you can troubleshoot computers you build doesn't mean you should have to when you purchase a computer. That is why you spend the incredibly big bucks that it costs to buy a Mac. It is supposed to work. And they are supposed to give good customer support.
Bottom line is you as a customer should never have to return or troubleshoot a part that makes up a piece of a larger product you purchased. The people who sold it to you (in this case Apple) should take the responsibility to fix it.
Re:A more obvious conclusion... (Score:3, Insightful)
I took a look at those posts, and they are not relevant to this issue. It's definitely an Apple problem.
Firstly, the SolidWorks example, "it crashes when it gets to 2gigs of RAM". Of course it does, you can only allocate 2gigs of RAM on 32 bit Windows without a magic switch that is off by default. When an app can't allocate any more RAM, it'll start getting NULL pointers back from malloc (assuming the machine doesn't grind into swap hell) and most apps aren't OOM safe. So it's a different issue.
Another one is "Half Life crashes when I enable the 3gig switch in boot.ini". The reason this is a switch off by default in Windows is that many poorly written apps make assumptions about pointers returned from malloc/VirtualAlloc, like being able to tweak the high bit to store their own information. When the OS starts handing out pointers above that boundary therefore, things start to break. Almost certainly, this is what is happening. This doesn't necessarily implicate Half Life - it could easily be a problem with any library it uses, third party or otherwise, or it could be some code injected into Half Life by some virus scanner/anti-spyware program etc.
None of these posts implicate the video driver as a problem.
Simple, stupid bugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's been my experience. When Windows fails, it's usually some strange registry corruption or chunk of spyware, taking down the entire system, and generally, you won't be able to fix it -- or it will be simpler and cheaper to reinstall the OS.
When Linux fails, either it's something in hardware (Linux seems to be more sensitive to bad RAM than Windows, which I consider to be a Good Thing), or it's something easily fixable -- not even by a kernel hacker, but by a competent admin with a little shell scripting ability. Even Gentoo isn't usually that hard to fix.
When OS X fails, it's going to be some annoying little thing. You'll contact Apple about it, they'll get back to you -- sometime this century -- and in the meantime, it'll piss you off enough to want to install Linux, or even Windows (if you're lucky enough to have an Intel Mac -- mine's PPC).
My bug is simple and stupid, and very annoying. My Powerbook has f1 through f10 or so mapped to hardware functions, which is actually quite nice, and I don't know if I'd easily get used to using the fn key to trigger those functions. That is, just hitting f1 would adjust monitor brightness (I think), whereas the alternative is having fn+f1 do that. But it also means that in order to pass it through to apps, or even the OS (other than hardware controls), I have to hit fn... So, to tell Expose to show me all windows, it's fn+f9.
Well, of course that was annoying as hell, and I often used Expose to peek in case something got lost -- my virtual desktops being buggy (still waiting on Spaces), often I'll accidentally move a window to another desktop and have it somehow bury itself under everything. Also, Adium has a habit of opening popup windows of any kind under what you're doing, which is nice, but a few kind of popups in particular don't trigger any notification (no growl, no sound, no duck bouncing in the tray), so the only way to see them is to hit Expose and check under your windows every few minutes to see if, say, someone had invited you to a chat, or sent you a file, or whatever.
So I mapped Expose to cmd+semicolon. Which is very nice on Dvorak, as the semicolon is where Z is on QWERTY -- looking on your keyboard, they are right next to each other (for PC people, that "Windows" key is the cmd key). The only problem is, the OS forgets this mapping every reboot. And, this being a Powerbook, I often just let it sleep -- for weeks at a time -- until an upgrade forces me to reboot, or I feel like showing off the Ubuntu livecd (or trying to get Linux to work again), or whatever. So it's not like this is part of my morning ritual -- boot computer, login, remap Expose. No, this is pretty random, and every time, it annoys the hell out of me.
Well, I submitted a detailed report on this issue. I would paste it here, but after digging up the original email, it seems that Apple places bug reports under a blanket non-disclosure agreement -- so certainly I may not paste their response here. However, I do know how to make a detailed and helpful report.
Their response: It's a known issue, currently being worked on by engineering. On the website, the bug's state is: Dupe. The website also confirms: I submitted this bug on July 25th, 20006. Their reply -- the email basically telling me it was a dupe, and that they're working on it -- came on September 22nd, 2006. As far as I know, the issue has not been resolved.
Frankly, I'm not surprised that Apple has been deleting bug discussion -- I don't know if they actually use their bug database for anything other than reassuring consumers that they know what's going on, but I now know that their standard response to bugs (or any flaw or deficiency) is to bury their head in the sand and pretend it never happened... until they fix the problem, and then claim it was always a good idea, and always what they were planning. Remember how they toted the G5's "Intel-crushing" performance (or was it "Pentium-crushing"? Whatever), before they suddenly switched to Intel, and now they're all a
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a toss-up. My new MacBook Pro is much faster than my old PowerBook. On the other hand, my old PowerBook never randomly refused to come out of suspend mode (or, if it did, closing the lid and opening it again fixed it; no data-loss). My old PowerBook didn't ever decide to reboot because I had closed the lid. My old PowerBook didn't kernel panic regularly, telling my that the ATi drivers had broken again (although it did have an ATi GPU). Oh, and my old PowerBook didn't need to run its fans quite so constantly to keep the CPU temperature at a sane level.
An incredible boon? No, just another step on Apple's gradual decline in quality.
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple Policy (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple's business model is niche high-priced ("overpriced" according to most). I don't know what "Its business model opens it to large monopsony power if it ever gets large". This is true for any company, lots of power in the market spells bad news for any consumer (look at DeBeers if you want to see a real monopoly). Oligopolies exist at virtually every level of the computer industry, and will continue to exist. Although Microsoft has the mainstream desktop environment under its thumb, there will probably be room for alternatives (OSX, Unix vendors) until software operates seemlessly across multiple platforms.
How this is modded +5 insightful? I don't know.
I think this guy is full of something... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you take a screen-capture of a post you made in a forum, unless:
a) You never did, but you instead manipulated an image in Photoshop to make it appear that you did.
b) You posted something that you knew would be removed because it ran afoul of some regulation, and you wanted to turn it into a scandal.
c) Were really REALLY anal about recording your every move you make on the internet so that future generations of internet users had full details of your 773t skillz.
Basically, bring it down to this. Who has more motivation in this instance? Someone with a vendetta against Apple, or Apple risking a scandal?
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:5, Insightful)
1. You have bad memory
2. You have a f-ed up or non-Intel compatible device driver or kernel extension/prefpane loaded
3. Your OS install is corrupt
I've seen this a ton of times when experienced Mac users get their hands on their new toy. They install their old versions of DiVX, APE, Adobe Bridge, scanner drivers, Quicktime extensions old HP all in one 3 gig "printer drivers" or just do something rash like copying over their entire
Friends don't let friends transplant their cobwebs between machines.
Back up your users folder (and ONLY your users folder), nuke & pave, and use the migration assistant to move the old account over to the clean system. Don't copy them by hand.
Then get the absolute latest drivers for your devices (only get Intel/Universal compiled drivers, prefpanes and kexts) and do NOT install Adobe Bridge CS2.
Do this, and unless you've got crap RAM, you'll have a clean system that doesn't flake out on you.
Re:Apple Policy gagged (Score:4, Insightful)
You can go to your
If ATI drivers are coming up and erroring out, they got loaded in there somehow, which means that you have other cobwebs in there deep.
Best of luck,
droog