Ubuntu 10.04 Is Hit By Major X.Org Memory Leak

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE3MA

Oh no ! I was afraid of something going haywire given all the newfangled things destined for 10.04 and Thursday next week is D-Day !
If only Intel hardware is affected I'm doomed.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/GEMLeak

 

Actually I can't remember any Ubuntu release that wasn't riddled with bugs.

As far as I can tell, their policy seems to be release first, fix later. Downloading new releases 2-3 weeks after the release date usually results in avoiding a lot of problems.

 

If you're using proprietary drivers, you are not affected.

Once again, all the more reasons to squeeze juice from the graphic card and go for official stuff, and the best choice in this case is Nvidia.

Mrk

 

Well having followed the forums closely the past month i would say nvidia is the one with most problems... ATI actually seems to be the least problem.

 

My experience with nvidia closed drivers on all systems since 2006 has been flawless. It's the way to go, if you want to have a proper card working with proper 3D shenanigans and whatnot.

Mrk

 

Yes, ATI does seem the most stable at the present time over in the Lucid subforum at ubuntuforums. Nvidia users are complaining quite frequently. If this memory leak is true then I'm screwed on my Lenovo G530 (it has an Intel graphics card). Funny, seems to run fine when I have Lucid on this particular laptop. Guess we'll see on release day (April 29th...one week from today). The RC that was released today is the same as the April 19th daily build (for those who rsync or zsync daily...like me... ).

Later...

 

@ all

Stay calm, do not panic; please circle the wagon instead . No release has ever been bug free (major or minor). The important thing is that such a bug will be fixed before the official release date.

Thanks.

 

That's because they follow a fixed schedule unlike MS who just takes their sweet time. Of course, there is an advantage to waiting longer for more stability, but there's also an advantage to having a new release every 6 months as opposed to every 5-6 years.

If you want the best stability it's better to stay a release behind. That is, use 9.10 instead of 10.04 and then switch to 10.04 when 10.10 comes out. And, of course, Ubuntu also offers an LTS every 18 months, so if one doesn't want to be upgrading every 6 months, that's an option.

 

At least they dont make you pay through your nose and then use you as guinea pig. Lucid is still beta so all this is still expected. if Ubuntu were to be that buggy, it ain't gonna last at the top of the Totem pole for long, one of the reasons its hated so much.

 

Nvidia is the champ in Linux camp, ATI can't even do basic video acceleration with its high end card, nvidia's cheapest 8400GS will do that happily for you with latest mplayer. I have a dual GPU ATI 4850 collecting dust due to the same sad reason.

 

I have had nothing but bad luck with the latest Ubuntu and nvidia, granted it is not an add in graphics card but a chipset. It won't even boot on this machine. So, I am with the old standby for now CentOS 5.4

It may be upstream as Squeez didn't work either, 9.10 works ok.

 

I suppose that's the best that can be said - you don't pay, at least not with hard dollars. That they don't use you as a guinea pig, on the other hand, is somewhat debatable.

 

Guinea pig means you are the part of the experiment and have no way out, can't be said about Linux, you have too many ways out there. Everyone releases buggy software, point is that xorg, gdm, gnome and other stuff like Kernels, the distro maker has really no control over it, either stick to old ones for stability and pay the price or go for latest, Ubuntu or Fedora can't really be blamed for that, of course one has choice of stable distros using proven but old stuff, examples are Debian stable, CentOS and a few more. The GEM issue thats creating the memory leak effects mostly those using Intel driver, Mrk is right no dot about nvidia, I have never ever used drivers from repo, in Linux, the video scene is being worked constantly to bring it to Windows level, subsequently its important to use latest driver from manufacturer rather than use the old ones from the repos, usually lots of bugs are also fixed, I remember in Intrepid, they shipped with older 180.32 series drivers which had a issue with Firefox and therefore lots suffered grief except for those that went and installed latest driver from the site.

 

Fixed.

(At first I was going to put "Linux", but then I realized, Windows XP was pretty buggy when it first came out... And Vista RTM was a mess. And really, for almost all the software I've used, the first release of a given series has been quite buggy and required many subsequent updates.)

 

I'm wondering if one can really call each Ubuntu version the "first release of a given series", though.

 

I will download the ISO later. But I can I tell if the ISO I am downloaded has all the bugs fixed so far? Do they update the ISOs with the latest updates?

 

For LTS they do every six months or so and number it accordingly, for instance 8.04.2 or 3 or so.

 

2K SP2 hosed many systems, so did XPx64 SP1 or Vista SP1, story goes on, don't forget 3.11, Millennium etc.

 

I must say, I wasn't expecting parallels to be drawn between Ubuntu and other operating systems that supposedly "hosed many systems" as well.

I understand that you're trying to defend Ubuntu, but I am glad to see honesty. After all, admitting the problem is the first step to fixing it.

 

No defense, just like humans and their creation, any software is fallible and not otherwise. The fact that Ubuntu also gets installed on maximum number of PCs compared to other distros also brings out the bugs more than others.

 

Bug fixed, no need to wait for Service Pack

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/04/xorg-memory-leak-bug-in-ubuntu-1004-fix.html#more

As Mrk had pointed out, those using proprietary nvidia or ATI drivers weren't affected, only those using inbuilt drivers like Intel and some ATI were.

 

So back to glx 1.2. glxinfo on my Karmic shows 1.3. (server 1.4). Can you speculate as to what features we will not be enjoying ?

 

Ocky, in case you install proprietary drivers, this thing is immaterial. I am on latest pre-release 195.36.24 on Karmic where my server is shown as version 1.4.

 

linuxforall, I realise I will be OK, but my wife has a Dell 1525 laptop which I think has the Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100.
So it appears she would have been affected were there no fix. Nevertheless the fix reverts to glx 1.2, that is why I wanted to tap into your (U)buntu knowledge bank to find out what if any features she would missing out on.

 

From what I read at Launchpad, they will revert back to latest xorg by the time of release if they find it passes all the tests. If you are interested, you can add the x to keep it latest. https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/ archive/x-updates