Comment 121 for bug 151168

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Daniel J Blueman (danielblueman) wrote :

This bug is still prevalent in 8.04.1 as of 2008-08-20; as the current nvidia driver (169.12+2.6.24.13-19.45) sets a flag in the pages used to map textures from, and the flag isn't cleared on the correct path, allocated pages get locked. There is a (userspace) per-process 32KB locked limit for good reason, yet we're seeing gigabytes being locked (drivers can do what they want), which is catastrophic.

This ultimately leads to a fatal OOM situation; the OOM killer doesn't guarantee that compiz.real will get killed, however all workflow is lost, as the system will be paging and with little or zero pagecache; page reclamation logic will be scanning for pages to reclaim and desperately shrinking pools - everything will suffer.

Basically, this single bug destroys your uptime, forcing workarounds and risk for technical users catching it in time; indeed it is (was, will be) the biggest productivity-eater I've experienced (much like windows updates can force you to reboot, let alone even doing it for you).

Timo et al, now that nVidia has addressed this bug in updated, stable drivers, what conditions prevent us testing an SRU?