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Apple/NVidia Driver Bug — Question Deleted
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?"
I don't claim to know anything Apple's forum rules, but could it not be that the question was removed because they thought this was an Nvidia bug and as such not their responsibility to discuss?
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.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
There's this thing in your browser called a cache that stores a copy of pages you visit...
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Either that, or the tinfoil hat's beginning to cut off circulation.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"Using your Mac Pro" might not have been the appropriate section to post your topic in.
Stuck your neck out? You are AC. Anyone could have posted that. In fact, I am somewhat doubtful that the parent and GP were even written by the same AC.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I read your post, and I'm struggling to figure out just what the hell your question is. You ask "who is fixing this bug?" but in a place where nobody that could actually provide the answer will be looking. You've clearly already made up your mind that there is some sort of "power struggle" or conspiracy going on, so what, if anything, could someone tell you that would satisfy you? I don't know what the criteria for removal is on those forums, but I suspect yours was removed because it was pointless and inflammatory, not because of any conspiracy. That you feel that having one forum post removed is a crisis worth submitting to Slashdot reeks of paranoia.
Why don't you try Apple's bug reporting site instead of the Discussion forums? You know, the place where you actually report bugs?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
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.
1 Switch to an ATI card. They always seem to work better with OS X. I don't know why, but the NVIDIA cards never seem to work that well for me in OS X.
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.)
How about this: the forum post deletions are the result of an overzealous moderator, and as a result, your post to slashdot is the result is an overzealous conspiracy theory?
Dumb bug on someone's part, but you're looking for a conspiracy where there is likely none.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If I buy a Ford, and the Firestone tire fails under warranty, you better believe I will be going back to the Ford dealership to take care of the problem, and not Firestone.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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.
I was going to mention that the problem completely sounds as a memory issue. I mean the guy got these issues right after upgrading the RAM AND it tends to happen after going above 2.0GB...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"So you spend money on computers without researching?"
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.
In a recent Slashdot article 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?" 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.
If every moderator rates a comment as -1 Troll or the comment contains yet another ASCII art version of the penis bird,
is there really any reason to archive it for posterity?
Apple has chosen to take responsibility for sole distribution and release and thus support. That's what I mean by nVidia doesn't "do" Apple drivers. For other platforms, they distribute them directly, and they support them. However that's not the case for OS-X. Thus the proper channel to go through is Apple.
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'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
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If a modern Mac is kernel panicking EVER, you've got a serious issue under the hood.
/Library/ folder (which would result in PPC drivers and kexts from your old Mac getting shoehorned into the clean system).
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.
I almost forgot.
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app and take a look at your crash logs. This will tell you what software is taking down the system if you don't feel like committing to a full nuke & pave (although, to achieve a pristine system you really really really should).
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