NVIDIA Fixes Old Compiz Bug

jones_supa writes NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent on NVIDIA hardware. There have been bug reports dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue, and they also proposed a patch. "Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this," wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet. The Compiz patch has been accepted upstream.

Comments

Ok... so why is this headline news?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many thousands of bugfixes are commited each day in open source projects? Why is this worthy of a Slashdot headline? :P

Re:Ok... so why is this headline news?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those bugs that generates thousands of comments and a big flame war. Everyone who uses nvidia and Ubuntu (ie easily over half of Linux users) has encountered this bug. Compiz is now maintained by Ubuntu and it was one of their changes in the 0.9 series which introduced this bug in the first place. They've been unable to fix if for about 5 years. But the really interesting part is that Nvidia finally stepped in and fixed it, even though it isn't their problem. Quite possibly because Ubuntu developers in their inability to fix it have constantly blamed Nvidia.

Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free.

[BlueMonk]

Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.

Not fixed by Ubuntu

[zdzichu]

The headline gets it slightly wrong. Ubuntu (i.e Canonical) did not fix bug for at least three years.