Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

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yian_dev88

Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by yian_dev88 »

Hello, i made this post mainly as a warning for people/developers to be carefull of kernel 4.15 and nvidia drivers 390.25 version.
I use Mint as stable daily driver, but past few days i tried installing some other distros manjaro/ubuntu to check newer software and i use kernel 4.15 it has either broken realtek ethernet r8169 drivers or something about networking. Also for rolling releases like arch/antergos the nvidia driver 390.25 has the worst performance regressions i have ever seen it makes any browsing/video/youtube near impossible, the problem is that you cant revert back to nvidia-387/ 384 because its not in the repos anymore, crazy. You have to recompile and patch old versions pretty dificult i couldnt do it.

So users if you think using newer driver 390.25 for nvidia(i have gtx 970) on any distro, do not use it until you are 100% you can revert or its been fixed.
Mint developers if you read this please do not put 4.15 kernel and nvidia 390.25 anywhere near linux mint in future versions, its the worst combination i have ever used, even running any old kernel with software rendering/nouveau is much more usable than that. Make sure issues have been fixed if you plan to include them in Mint 19, and offer a path to downgrade drivers trough online repo's sounds like a good idea, recompiling manually when there is a regression is too difficult.

Thanks for great work ;)
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Hoser Rob
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Re: Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by Hoser Rob »

If you always have to have the newest kernel, which is neither usuallly necessary or recommeded in Mint, this sort of thing is going to happen.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong - H. L. Mencken
idle

Re: Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by idle »

Hoser Rob wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:28 am If you always have to have the newest kernel, which is neither usuallly necessary or recommeded in Mint, this sort of thing is going to happen.
Coming from Windows I kind of find this aspect of Linux confusing. Why are these updates offered if they are neither necessary or recommended :? As of right now I have 4 updates available that I have no idea what to do about ...

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thx-1138
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Re: Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by thx-1138 »

idle wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:57 am Coming from Windows I kind of find this aspect of Linux confusing. Why are these updates offered if they are neither necessary or recommended :? As of right now I have 4 updates available that I have no idea what to do about ...
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Updates with a ! exclamation mark are security updates. Level 4 updates are 'sensitive' ones, ie. updates that might affect the previously known to behave trouble-free workflow.
So, you do the in-between math among those 2, read the changelogs, and if you feel you actually need to apply such, do so by installing on a one-by-one basis: this way, if something gets broken / misbehaves, you know what the offending update was.
yian_dev88

Re: Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by yian_dev88 »

Hoser Rob wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:28 am If you always have to have the newest kernel, which is neither usuallly necessary or recommeded in Mint, this sort of thing is going to happen.
Im not one to always spam apt-get update or pacman -Syu, but if i want to use a rolling distro regardless on what its based i currently cant due to the fact that they dont offer repos to easily downgrade kernels and drivers because regressions do happen.

The reason im annoyed and why i made this thread is that the devs/maintainers of those distro didnt bother to check the kernel or drivers for regressions and after many have posted in threads having terrible issues they havent rollback to previous driver.
So hopefully Mint will properly test next release for these issues.

And this is not for rolling releases only, i tried ubuntu/fedora/antergos;manjaro/ solus, anything that uses kernel 4.15 or driver 390.25 has the issues at least on my pc and based on threads:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... ?offset=25
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234241

Best way to figure out if an update breaks something is to wait a couple of weeks and check for threads with issues, but i still think dev testing and offerring repo's to downgrade with precompiled kernel/drivers is the safest way you never know when one single hardware or gpu model breaks and you need rollback.
Hoser Rob
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Re: Warning Kernel 4.15 and nvidia 390.25 drivers!!!

Post by Hoser Rob »

yian_dev88 wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 11:43 am
Hoser Rob wrote: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:28 am If you always have to have the newest kernel, which is neither usuallly necessary or recommeded in Mint, this sort of thing is going to happen.
Im not one to always spam apt-get update or pacman -Syu, but if i want to use a rolling distro regardless on what its based i currently cant due to the fact that they dont offer repos to easily downgrade kernels and drivers because regressions do happen.

The reason im annoyed and why i made this thread is that the devs/maintainers of those distro didnt bother to check the kernel or drivers for regressions and after many have posted in threads having terrible issues they havent rollback to previous driver.
So hopefully Mint will properly test next release for these issues.

And this is not for rolling releases only, i tried ubuntu/fedora/antergos;manjaro/ solus, anything that uses kernel 4.15 or driver 390.25 has the issues at least on my pc and based on threads:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... ?offset=25
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=234241

Best way to figure out if an update breaks something is to wait a couple of weeks and check for threads with issues, but i still think dev testing and offerring repo's to downgrade with precompiled kernel/drivers is the safest way you never know when one single hardware or gpu model breaks and you need rollback.
Of course Mint doesn't check those updates for all hardware. Or its Ubuntu base. No Linux distro does. You're talking about open source projects, understaffed by volunteers. Microsoft has tens of thousands of people hired to do testing on all kinds of obscure hardware. Linux devs simply don't have the resources to do that and in Linux you have to be your own system administrator.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong - H. L. Mencken
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