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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?
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
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.
Seems more like a complaint/accusation masked as a question, rather than a serious question and might have been removed for that reason.
How often do people take screen grabs of their posts to a forum?
Was their expectation of it being removed? I find that more confusing then the fact that it was deleted.
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.
:p
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
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.
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...
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
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?
There's this thing in your browser called a cache that stores a copy of pages you visit...
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
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.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
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.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The post was clearly redundant, as the bug will be fixed in the future, and the release date back-dated :)
The article was about a Mac Pro, not a MacBook Pro, which is a laptop. The MacBook Pro has an ATI video card not a NVidia card.
[This comment has been removed by CmdrTaco Sunday January 14, @05:31PM]
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.
My experience with Apple's handling of reported bugs has been _very_ bad. I reported dozens of problems, all with as much technical information as possible (I am a OS programmer myself) and none of them got any resolution whatsoever except for some time passing comments which mostly intended to make me understand they don't care about the bugs.
Of particular mention is a security bug - complete with stack traces, register values and other goodies. No response and the bug still exists after 3 releases of the product.
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.
As a default setting, I'd agree. However, this post, this post, this post, and perhaps this post, suggest to me that that isn't the most likely explanation, but rather that there is a cross-platform nVidia problem. (Just talking about what seems more likely, not what necessarily is the case in actuality.)
Tack that on to a reproducible core audio bug that makes the new dvd player app crash on certain disks. Reported that one till I was blue in the face.
Oh my god! CmdrTaco is so efficient and deadly at removing posts that he actually removed your post three hours before you even posted it!
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.)
Its all about competing with Microsoft to make sure they don't get yet another monopoly, this time on Evil ...
Two years ago, it was Sun's turn to be evil ... last year it was google's ; Novell tried last month, but they pretty much failed it, so Apple got the nod.
It now occurs to me just how good of a comparison that is. In both cases, when the included accessory fails, it causes a crash!
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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!
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?
Bad drivers, perhaps?
nVidia doesn't do Apple drivers. They may have their engineers help write them, but they don't support or distribute them. Apple is solely responsible for supporting the hardware they ship with their systems because they want it that way. You go to nVidia's site you'll find drivers for Windows of all varieties, Linux 32 and 64-bit, FreeBSD, and even Solaris, but no OS-X. So when you have problems with nVidias on OS-X, it's Apple that you need to talk to.
(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 http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/Mac_Pro/mac_pro _ram.html upgrade memory should have larger heatsinks than standard heatsinked FB-Dimms. It has links to: memory test utilities, ECC correction reports, and most notably:
Questions:
Hope this helps!
You're freaking nuts, and ignorant to boot. DRM was not the reason Apple switched to Intel - there's nothing DRM-specific about the Intel architecture. Apple switched because IBM was not able to deliver a PowerPC laptop chip that met modern performance targets (yes, we all know the G5 was fast, but it also sucked down power and spewed out heat).
And, name me one thing that Apple has done that involves DRM, besides the iTunes Music Store. You can't, because they haven't done ANYTHING. And the music store only has DRM at the insistence of the record labels.
As for the iPhone, I can't argue there - I can only hope that Apple will come to its senses in the next six months, and open it up for public development.
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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.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
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.
Don't use the scientology thing to put slashdot down for censorship. When Scientology threatened to sue, they did delete the post, but they then posted a frontpage story about being forced to take the post down that was basically an extended critique of Scientology, complete with a huge list of links to sources about the abuses of scientology, xenu.net links, etc., including links to the very material that they had been forced to remove. The offending material, of course, was reposted in another comment (probably several times over) in the new discussion. The net effect was not censorship at all but a huge expose against scientology that was probably seen by half a million readers. The offending material was removed from a single comment on slashdot where it probably would have been ignored, but links to the same material along with a coherent explanation of many of the things wrong with the church of scientology was posted to the front page where it was read and discussed publicly by a much larger audience than would have ever been exposed to it. It was a victory for free speech, and it's unfair to criticize slashdot for censorship based on that example.
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.